Women and the Politics of Sterilization

In 2003, North Carolina became the third U.S. state to apologize and the first to call for compensation to victims of state-ordered sterilizations carried out between 1929 and 1975. The decision was prompted largely by a series of articles in the Winston-Salem Journal. The stories were inspired in part by the meticulous research of Johanna Schoen, who was granted unique access to the papers of the...