num_pages: 46
description: Between 1929 and 1974 more than 7600 North Carolinians were sterilized sometimes without informed consent and frequently under coercion. The victims poor men and women from around the state were never compensated for losing the ability to conceive children. Nearly 40 years later during a rancorous 2013 legislative session in which severe restrictions on abortion voting rights and funding for public education were passed the state got another chance to right one of its most shameful acts. In this personal and powerful work of longform journalism from new digital publisher The New New South award-winning author Belle Boggs traces the chilling history of eugenics in America tells the poignant stories of North Carolina's sterilization victims and goes inside their decade-long fight for justice.Belle Boggs is the author of Mattaponi Queen a collection of linked stories that take place along Virginias Mattaponi River. Mattaponi Queen won the Bakeless Prize the Emyl Jenkins Sexton Literary Award from the Library of Virginia was a finalist for the 2010 Frank OConnor International Short Story Award was a 2010 Kirkus Reviews top fiction debut and was a finalist for the Library of Virginia Peoples Choice Award for fiction. Boggs has received fellowships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers conferences and is a recipient of a 2011 Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council and a 2012 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Boggs was named Best New Southern Author by Southern Living magazine and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review Harper's Glimmer Train the Oxford American Orion the Sun and other publications.
language: English
title: For the Public Good: Forced Sterilization and the Fight for Compensation
publisher: The New New South