1514: Google Me

[Blitzgal]

I love You Don't Know Jack. So there's at least two of us, Keith.

Regarding the forced sterilizations, these people were not given a choice to be sterilized for a small sum of cash. There have been a couple of programs like that in the past thirty years or so, but the issue that Keith was talking about on the show was known as eugenics. These women were forcibly sterilized, usually while they were already in the hospital to give birth to a child. The state had a program in place to identify "lesser" people who they deemed should not breed, and they were forcibly sterilized. They were not given a choice and they were not given money.

For example: NPR interviewed Lela Dunston, who was 13 years old and was not told that she'd been sterilized:
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/11/145020...zation-victims

The American eugenics programs are a very ugly stain on this country's history. Our eugenics programs pre-dated the Nazi's programs, and the Nazis actually cited American eugenicists when arguing that eugenics was a "humane" way of cleansing the gene pool. Our eugenics programs targeted the poor, women of color, immigrants, the mentally ill and mentally retarded.