Black woman sterilized due to eugenic agenda of Planned Parenthood board member

At the age of 14, after becoming pregnant from a violent rape, the eugenics board of the State of North Carolina decided Elaine Riddick should not have any more children and sterilized her without consent. Riddick claims the reason she was sterilized without her knowledge or approval was because the state of North Carolina had ruled her “feebleminded,” a degrading term commonly used in eugenics. She recently told her emotional story in the powerful documentary film, produced by Life Dynamics, Inc., called Maafa21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America, which Live Action is screening on social media this month. North Carolina’s eugenics program was funded in part by a member of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s Board of Directors and close friend of the Federation — Clarence Gamble. Gamble sat on the board of Sanger’s American Birth Control League (ABCL) as well as Planned Parenthood, and was also a financier of Sanger’s birth control crusade. In addition, he helped to fund the North Carolina Eugenics program.

Sanger, an established member of the American Eugenics Society, stacked her organization with like-minded men and women. In 1942, the ABCL changed its name to Planned Parenthood.

Elaine Riddick was kidnapped, molested, and became pregnant as a result of rape at 13 years of age. At the time, Riddick was living with her grandmother, Maggie Woodard, known as “Miss Peaches,” when a social worker with the State discovered her pregnancy. Her name was Sue L. Casebolt, and she referred Elaine’s case to the state’s Eugenics Board. Casebolt had been installed as the Executive Secretary of the North Carolina Eugenics Board in 1961.

According to Maafa21:

Riddick said that her grandmother was illiterate and did not understand what she was signing. Knowing this, the social worker pressured her to sign with an “X,” threatening to send Elaine to an orphanage, and remove her grandmother’s government aid for food if she did not. Unfortunately, the document her grandmother was pressured to sign was not a medical consent form for the birth, but a consent to have Elaine sterilized after she gave birth to her son Tony, now a successful businessman.

“I did not find out that they had sterilized me until I was nineteen years old,” Riddick says in Maafa21, adding:

Blacks sterilized by eugenics program funded by Margaret Sanger's financier

Riddick’s powerful testimony and nearly 40-year battle for justice secured millions of dollars for surviving victims in North Carolina. As a result of Riddick’s willingness to tell her story, North Carolina also agreed to make its eugenics records public.

North Carolina’s sterilization program began with the passage of the North Carolina Sterilization Act in 1929. In 1933, according to the North Carolina History Project online, the act was declared unconstitutional on the grounds that it “did not allow an appeals process. In the same year, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law allowing an appeal process and created the Board of Eugenics to oversee sterilizations.”

“Between 1929 and 1974, more than 7,600 North Carolinians were sterilized,” reports the Winston-Salem Journal, which wrote extensively on this tragedy, “many of them against their will. Young girls who had gotten pregnant, some by rape or incest, were frequently the targets. Some were flagged because faulty intelligence tests labeled them “feeble-minded,” others simply because they were epileptic. Many were young, poor and black.”

Eugenics Victim, Son Fighting for Justice

“It’s a very paternalistic model,” author and researcher Johanna Schoen said. “(Women) certainly weren’t supposed to choose when to use birth control or when not to use birth control, or when to be sterilized or when not to be sterilized. The model was, the physician knows best.”

Schoen writes in his book, “Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public”:

Schoen continues, “Sources indicate that some health officials might have found birth control programs appealing as a form of population control.”

Riddick is also understandably outspoken against Planned Parenthood, as the abortion corporation’s founder was  financially supported by Clarence Gamble, the man who also helped fund the very eugenics program that sterilized Riddick. “Euphemisms and sterilization target code words, for example, “feebleminded”, were used to describe Black women like me,” Riddick wrote in an op-ed:

Despite Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s ties to the horrors of eugenics, many laud her as a hero, including modern-day Planned Parenthood itself. But, as Mary Senander explains in the Star Tribune, Sanger was anything but a heroine:

Sanger supporter Clarence Gamble was a graduate of Harvard Medical School graduate, the heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, and a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a medical consultant for the Human Betterment League of North Carolina, another organization with ties to eugenics.

According to the book, “Intended Consequences,” in 1933, Gamble was elected president of the Pennsylvania Birth Control Federation, an organization affiliated with Sanger. And, according to researcher James A. Miller:

By 1939, Gamble joined others in funding Sanger’s Committee on Planned Parenthood. And, according to Senander’s article, “Eugenics part of Sanger legacy”:

Sanger’s 1939 letter to Gamble, about the infamous “Negro Project,” can be seen excerpted in the image below:

Gamble referred to eugenic sterilization as “preventative medicine,” writing in the North Carolina Medical Journal in 1951:

Then, by the early 1960’s, Gamble co-authored a booklet on family planning with Planned Parenthood’s president, Alan F. Guttmacher. It was published by Pathfinder Fund, an organization Gamble helped to found. The book was  entitled, “Family planning: a challenge to health workers of every nation.”

Guttmacher, a former vice-president of the American Eugenics Society, had been a longtime advocate of abortion and a strong proponent of government funded “family planning.” Author Angela Franks notes in her book on Sanger:

Research from the Winston-Salem Journal discovered that “Gamble wanted sterilizations to increase rather than decrease, and increase they did.”

According to the film, Maafa21, “In 1947, Gamble called for the expansion of North Carolina’s State’s sterilization program saying that for every feeble minded person sterilized, 40 more were polluting and degrading the bloodlines of future generation with their defective genes.”

Gamble had been promoting birth control since the late 1930s…” writes the Winston-Salem Journal. In addition:

According to Maafa21, “North Carolina was not the only state whose eugenics programs were influenced by friends of Sanger or Planned Parenthood. In some parts of the country, Planned Parenthood was closely associated with these state eugenics boards and was often a referral agency for them.” You can watch Maafa21 on Live Action’s Facebook page.

In her quest to get justice for eugenics victims, Elaine Riddick testified tearfully:

Riddick told the lawmakers that her only crime was being poor, Black, and from a bad home environment.

Between 1929 and 1974, nearly 7,600 documented males and females were sterilized by choice, force or coercion under the authority the NC Eugenics Board program. The youngest victims were ten years of age.

• 85% of victims were female.

• 40% of victims were minorities, including African Americans and Native Americans.

In 2010, the Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation was established as a Division of the NC Department of Administration to compensate victims who were forcibly sterilized by the State. The exact number of victims alive today is unknown. However, the State Center for Health Statistics estimates that 2,944 victims may have still been alive as of 2010. It is more realistically estimated by the State Center that 1,500 to 2,000 victims may still be alive.

In 2013, the NC state legislature included $10 million in the budget to be divvied among verified victims.

Eugenics is an evil ideology that tragically remains alive today. As Live Action News has previously documented, the philosophy of eugenics continues to morph under different terms such as abortion and euthanasia. Today, abortion disproportionately targets the African American community — and the main promoter of abortion is Planned Parenthood.

Although Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, an eugenics enthusiast, the organization has yet to denounce her. That is because Planned Parenthood’s ties to eugenics run just as deep as their founder’s — and that evil root, which claims to decide who is worthy to live or to die, exists to this day.