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Unwed mother recalls forced sterilization done by state claiming she was `feebleminded'
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. Rose Brooks caught the eye of the state when she had twin sons out of wedlock. A few months later, she was taken to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and surgically sterilized. Virginia conducted 7,450 sterilizations from 1924 to 1979 under the banner of eugenics, or selective human breeding and social engineering. On Thursday, Brooks was there when Virginia became the first of the 30 states that conducted such sterilizations to apologize. Brooks, 61, helped unveil a highway marker honoring the memory of Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old unwed mother who became the first person sterilized under Virginia's 1924 law. Brooks was 17 when she gave birth to twins at a Lynchburg hospital. "I held them, but that was it," she said. "I really got upset I had to give them up. The nurse said, `Why do you give them up?' I said I have no choice, ma'am." The twins were "taken away from me by the court and (the court) said I wasn't fit to take care of them because I was feebleminded. I wasn't feebleminded," she said. Eleven years later, she was discharged from the colony so she could help care for her grandmother, who had raised her after her mother died. For years, she had no idea her sons had been adopted. "I thought they had passed away," she said. In 1991 she got a phone call: "Johnny called first. He said, `Do you know who this is? This is your son." His twin, Jerry, called the next day. Both of them drove to Lynchburg a few days later. "I cried a lot when I saw them," Brooks said. © The Associated Press |
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