A sterilization program that ran in the US state of North Carolina from 1929 to 1974 was explicitly designed to "reproduce" black citizens and met the UN definition of genocide, a study said this week.
Nearly 7,600 men, women, and children ages 10 and under were surgically sterilized under the program created to serve the "public good" by preventing people deemed "weak" and others from becoming parents.
Most were coerced, but some women who had no other contraceptive method sought sterilization by declaring themselves unfit mothers.
The new article was published in the American Review of Political Economy.
She examined the years 1958 to 1968, a period in which more than 2,100 authorized sterilizations occurred in the state's 100 counties.
The authors found that, during the period they studied, sterilization rates increased with the size of the unemployed black population, but unemployed whites and other races were not similarly attacked.
Duke University professor and co-author William Darity Jr said the United Nations definition of genocide cites the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
This includes, according to the text of the Geneva Convention, "imposing measures aimed at preventing births within the group."
"North Carolina's disproportionate use of eugenic sterilization on its black citizens was an act of genocide," said Darity.
From NDTV News
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