In 1968 abortion was illegal in America and 13-year-old Dolores Riddick was pregnant as the result of a brutal rape. Her mother was in prison for assaulting her father, an alcoholic veteran who had lost custody of his daughter to her maternal grandmother. When Dolores gave birth to a son, Tony Riddick, she cared for him herself, even breastfeeding him. She dropped out of the eighth grade and didn’t go back.
It was against this backdrop of already tragic events in this young girl’s life that members of the North Carolina Eugenics Board met in Room 539 of the state Education Building in Raleigh to consider the latest petitions for “operation of sterilization or asexualization.” Among them was Case No. 8: “Delores Elaine Riddick — (N) — Perquimans County.” The “N” stood for Negro.
Though she had been previously characterized by a school psychologist as “well behaved, pleasant and cooperative,” the Eugenics Board social worker wrote of her, “does not get along well with others.” Though the school psychologist found her to be “doing above average work,” a more recent doctor’s report had assessed Dolores as “feebleminded.”
The committee determined, “Because of Elaine’s inability to control herself, and her promiscuity … the physician has advised sterilization. This will at least prevent additional children from being born to this girl who cannot care for herself, and can never function in any way as a parent.”
Dolores, still a child herself, had no idea that while she was in the hospital giving birth to her son, physicians had cut and cauterized her fallopian tubes, leaving her permanently sterile.
This June, Riddick testified before the Governor’s Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolina’s Eugenics Boards.
“I am not feebleminded,” she shouted, turning to face the packed hearing room. “I’ve never been feebleminded.”
“No,” says her son, standing beside her behind the podium.
“So what am I worth?” she asked the five people seated at the long table before her. “The kids that I did not have, could not have. What are they worth?”
“Priceless,” Tony Riddick whispers as he gently rubs his mother’s back.
Tears streaming down her face, she says, “They cut me open like I was a hog.”
As far as Riddick is concerned, she was raped twice. Once by the man who fathered her son, and again by the Eugenics Board of the State of North Carolina, which deemed her, at age 14, unfit to procreate.
Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina sterilized more than 7,600 individuals in the name of “improving” the state’s human stock. By the time the program was halted, the majority of those neutered were young, black, poor women — like Riddick.
Read more at HuffingtonPost.com
