RALEIGH

Elaine Riddick Jessie and Nial Cox Ramirez, sterilized more than 30 years ago by order of state officials they never met, finally got to tell their stories yesterday of the pain that those operations caused.

"Yes, I have a lot of anger in me ... because of what I had to go through all my life," said Jessie, who was sterilized in Chowan County in 1968, when she was 14. She told a committee appointed by Gov. Mike Easley how the operation happened after she became pregnant by a man in his 20s - statutory rape by law. "I was only a child," she said.

Jessie and Ramirez cried as they talked, as did some members of the Eugenics Study Committee, which is considering reparations and other forms of compensation for those sterilized by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina. It ordered operations on more than 7,600 people from 1929 through 1974.

"The sadness that I feel about what has happened then turns to rage about has happened," said Carmen Hooker Odom, the chairwoman of the committee and the secretary of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.

Easley apologized for the eugenics program in response to a series of stories in the Winston-Salem Journal, two of which featured Jessie and Ramirez. The Eugenics Study Committee is the first of its kind in the nation.

Yesterday, committee members asked Jessie and Ramirez what they want the state to do for them.

Carmen Hooker Odom, left, and Rep. Larry Womble, right, welcome Elaine Riddick Jessie, and her son Tony Riddick to the committee meeting in Raleigh. (Photo by Karen Tam)

"I want whatever I can get out of the state of North Carolina," Jessie said. "They should have just cut off my arm or just killed me."

Ramirez said she just wants to make sure that no one else is ever sterilized.

"I would want that no one would ever have to go through the pain that I went through," she said.

She and Jessie talked to attentive state officials yesterday in a conference room not far from the one where the five-member Eugenics Board voted to have them sterilized in the 1960s. They never got a chance to appear before that board.

"Who were these people ... who can go behind closed doors and make a decision on your life, how your life is going to be run?" Ramirez asked.

She and Jessie, who met face-to-face for the first time yesterday, have similar stories. Both come from northeastern North Carolina. They are black and were poor, as were most of those sterilized by the state in the 1960s.

Social workers prepared petitions to have both sterilized, and both were sterilized after having one child. Ramirez said that her social worker threatened to take her family off welfare if she didn't consent to be sterilized. "If I could just get my hands around her neck, I would kill her," she said.

Ramirez was sterilized in 1965 in Washington County when she was 18.

She and Jessie moved to New York, and now live in the Atlanta area. They have little use for North Carolina, and can't forget what the state did to them.

"I tried so hard to bury this, but it just won't go away," Ramirez said. "It's like a cancer that eats you and eats you and eats you."

As one justification for being sterilized, Riddick and Jessie were labeled "feeble-minded" on the basis of flawed intelligence testing. The two children born to the women work in the computer field.

Jessie's son, Tony Riddick of Winfall, and Ramirez's daughter, Deborah Chesson of Georgia, accompanied their parents to the committee hearing. When his mother couldn't talk through her tears, Riddick took over.

"Who has the audacity, or really the authority, to do these things, and where do you get it from?" he asked.

He was glad for the committee's work, he said, then placed his hands on either side of his mother's head. "I just wish we could fix this right here."

Chesson wondered what the children of those sterilized might have accomplished.

"One of those babies could have grown up and found a cure for cancer or diabetes or MS," she said.

Hooker Odom said that the committee hopes to submit in June its recommendations to Easley about what should be done.

Options include help with health-care costs incurred by those sterilized. Jessie said that the operation left her with bleeding spells for years afterward, and said she sees a psychiatrist and takes Prozac as well as another drug to help her sleep.

Jessie and Ramirez came to Raleigh at the invitation of Rep. Larry Womble, D-Forsyth, who is a member of the study committee. On Tuesday, the House Health Committee is scheduled to discuss a bill sponsored by Womble that would erase one of the final remnants of the state sterilization program: a law that gives judges the right to order sterilizations for the mentally ill. The law has rarely been used.

An amendment to the bill would give parents the right to have their mentally retarded or mentally ill children sterilized in special circumstances.

Womble and the committee are also considering other laws that might help those sterilized and make sure that such a program never happens again.

As they explore ways of helping those sterilized, committee members said they plan to ask for comments from Jessie and Ramirez and any other victims who might come forward.

Pam Young and other committee members thanked Jessie and Ramirez for telling their stories.

"You're two very strong and courageous women ... to have endured these kinds of feelings and thoughts for so many years," said Young, the deputy secretary for the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources.

• John Railey can be reached at 727-7288 or at jrailey@wsjournal.com