2000s

Coming into the 21st century, state governments began to officially recognize and apologize for their part in eugenic legislation and sterilization efforts. In 2001, Virginia was the first state to formally issue an apology for its widespread practice of eugenic sterilization. California and North Carolina (after a Eugenics Study Committee Report) followed suit in 2003, with North Carolina and West Virginia officially repealing eugenic legislation in 2003 and 2013, respectively. Although this decade was accompanied by formal acknowledgments and apologies, survivors of sterilizations and reproductive injustice continued to push for forms of reparations. States such as California, Virginia, and North Carolina. The Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation was established as a Division of the North Carolina Department of Administration in 2010 to compensate victims who were forcibly sterilized by the State of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board program. Their state compensation program was the first in the nation. In 2015, the Virginia Victims of Eugenics Sterilization Compensation Program (VESC) was set up to provide compensation for people involuntarily sterilized according to the 1924 Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act (“Act”) It was not until 2021 that California passed a bill to compensate survivors of forced sterilization. 

Moreover, eugenic logic and discourse have not disappeared at large. Though it is debated whether the 2000s ushered in a return to eugenics and race science, a form of neo-eugenics, or something new altogether, continuities in eugenic logics and values have maintained their influence on mechanisms of research, policy, and medicine. Autism Speaks, an organization which many disability advocates consider inherently eugenic, was formed in 2005 primarily to find a “cure” for autism. Their MSSNG project is the world’s largest autism genome sequencing program. Project Prevention, which formed in 1997, expanded to the UK in 2010. 

Further, coercive sterilizations continued to happen, with the most notable recorded phenomenon happening in California women’s prisons. The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR, now Reveal) reported that between 2006 and 2010, at least 148 pregnant women received tubal ligations shortly after giving birth while incarcerated at two California prisons. These tubal ligations were performed without required state approvals. Forced sterilizations were outlawed in 1979 California. Belly of the Beast is a documentary on ongoing legacies of eugenics and reproductive injustice in the United States (in the context of California’s Department of Corrections).