North Carolina Eugenics Law
During the initial years after North Carolina’s law passed, state officials made only half-hearted use of it. But in 1932, a lawsuit surrounding the sterilization of Mary Brewer, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of five, resulted in the redrafting of the state sterilization statute and the formalization of sterilization procedures. The new law, introduced by a member of the Board of Directors of Caswell Training School, a state mental health institution, established a state Eugenics Board composed of the commissioner of public welfare, the secretary of the State Board of Health, the chief medical officers of the State Hospital in Raleigh and of an institution of the feebleminded or the insane, and the attorney general of North Carolina. The board received petitions for sterilization from the state’s penal and charitable institutions and from county superintendents of public welfare, and it voted on the authorization of these petitions. As the only state in the nation that gave social workers the power to file sterilization petitions, North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization program represented the state's financial interest in sterilization more clearly than any other state program did.
With the passage of the state’s eugenic sterilization law, health and welfare officials in charge of implementing the program began to bring their own policy goals to the table. Since the directors of mental institutions as well as social workers could submit sterilization petitions, these goals ranged from controlling welfare spending to improving the health of sterilization candidates to easing institutional overcrowding by sterilization and then releasing inmates of the state’s training schools. Having identified an individual as being in need of eugenic sterilization, petitioners put together sterilization petitions that contained information about clients' social, medical, and eugenic history and submitted the applications to the North Carolina Eugenics Board. At monthly board meetings, Eugenics Board members would review these petitioners and vote on sterilization decisions. Once the board authorized a petition, the case was assigned to the hospital closest to the patient, where staff surgeons performed the operation. While some hospitals and surgeons might have been more likely than others to come in contact with eugenic sterilization, the surgeons assigned to such cases had no special link with the state sterilization program; they encountered the sterilizations as part of their regular workload.
Sterilization candidates or their legal guardians had to consent to sterilization. If they failed to do so, the Eugenics Board would call a hearing at which family members could voice their opposition to the procedure. Some family members took advantage of this opportunity and came, with or without lawyers, to voice their objections or to seek further clarification about the surgery. If, following the hearing, board members still believed that eugenic sterilization was advisable, they could authorize the surgery over the patient’s or the patient’s guardian’s objections. Most patients and guardians, however, did not attend the hearing. In these cases, a hearing served as a legal formality that allowed the Eugenics Board to authorize a sterilization despite the lack of consent. Theoretically, the state had the power to force individuals by court order to submit to the surgery once it had been authorized. In practice, however, state authorities were hesitant to resort to outright force. If patients did not submit to sterilization orders, state authorities either rested the cases or filed new petitions at a later date in the hope that families would change their minds.
[1] North Carolina State Board of Public Welfare, “Eugenical Sterilization,” North Carolina Welfare Laws Bulletin 24 (1944): 150.