Lawmakers will vote on the final budget later this week before sending it to the governor. | REUTERS No cash for N.C. sterilization victims

North Carolina lawmakers have agreed to a budget plan that stiffs victims of the state’s forced sterilization program, according to a report.

While members of the state House in May supported giving $50,000 compensation for living victims of North Carolina’s eugenics program, the money was not included in the state Senate’s budget, the Associated Press reported.


North Carolina’s program forcibly sterilized more than 7,600 people from 1929 to 1974.

Lawmakers will vote on the final state budget plan later in the week before sending it to Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue — and although some supporters said they would continue fighting for the money’s inclusion in the budget, others said they didn’t see any chance for the proposal’s success at this point.

“I’m appalled that the North Carolina Senate today took no action to compensate the victims that we as a state robbed of their rights to reproduce and to have children,” Democratic state Rep. Earline Parmon said, according to the AP. “At this point, I have lost all hope.”

Perdue had set aside more than $10 million for compensation in her proposed budget. She had the support from the Republican state House speaker for giving money to victims, but was unable to get the backing of Republicans in the state Senate, the AP reported. Senators who opposed compensating the victims said they were concerned about how much it would wind up costing the state and what precedent it could set for people to seek damages for past wrongs.

“If you could lay the issue to rest, it might be one thing. But I’m not so sure it would lay the issue at rest because if you start compensating people who have been ‘victimized’ by past history, I don’t know where that would end,” Republican state Sen. Austin Allran said, adding that the state “has no money anyway.”

The Winston-Salem Journal first exposed North Carolina’s eugenics programs ten years ago in its investigative series, “ Against Their Will.” The paper estimated that about 1,500 victims of the program are still living.

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