During a 45-year period that ended in 1974, North Carolina forcibly sterilized some 7,600 poor, sick and mentally challenged individuals as a recourse for a variety of reasons. Some underwent the procedure as punishment for sexual aggression and others because of mental illness, but many were subjected to that inhumanity without a modicum of justification.

A panel studying the program recently proposed compensation for the victims, offering a plan to pay each person $50,000. While one cannot begin to put a price tag on the humiliation meted out by North Carolina to thousands of its citizens, that does recognize the abject wrong committed by the state and should be quickly approved by the General Assembly.

Eugenics — a belief that the human race would be genetically improved through selective breeding and sterilization — gained traction in the United States around the beginning of the 20th century. Long before it was associated with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, many states embraced the scientific theory as a way to eliminate “undesirable” people and characteristics from the gene pool.

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