California’s last-ditch attempt to find 600 forced sterilisation victims owed compensation

About 600 people alive today can’t have children because California’s government sterilised them either against their will or without their knowledge, and now the state is trying to find them so it can pay them at least US$15,000 each in reparations.

But after a year of searching, the state has approved just 51 people for payments out of 310 applications. There’s one year left to look before the US$4.5 million programme shuts down and the challenges remain steep. State officials have denied 103 people, closed three incomplete applications and are processing 153 others – but they say it’s difficult to verify the applications as many records have been lost or destroyed.

Two groups of people are eligible for the money: Those sterilised by the government during the so-called eugenics movement that peaked during the 1930s and a smaller group who were victimised while in state prisons about a decade ago.

“We try to find all the information we can and sometimes we just have to hope that somebody maybe can find more detailed information on their own”, said Lynda Gledhill, executive officer of the California Victim Compensation Board that oversees the programme. “We’re just sometimes not able to verify what happened”.

California in 2021 was the third state to approve a reparations programme for forced sterilisations, joining North Carolina and Virginia. But California was the first state to also include more recent victims from its state prison system.

The eugenics movement sought to prevent some people with mental illness or physical disabilities from being able to have children. California had the nation’s largest forced sterilisation programme, sterilising about 20,000 people beginning in 1909. It was so well known that it later inspired practices in Nazi Germany. The state did not repeal its eugenics law until 1979.