The scar from Annie Buelin's sterilization surgery still hurts 51 years after the Eugenics Board of North Carolina ordered her to undergo the operation when she was 14.

She is one of more than 7,600 people sterilized by the state from 1929 through 1974 after rudimentary and inaccurate tests indicated that they were "feeble-minded" or had low IQs. Some were sterilized because they had children out of wedlock or reputations for engaging in premarital sex.

Buelin - who still lives near the house where she grew up in Surry County - was not sterilized for any of the reasons that social workers usually gave, though. She was sterilized after her mother gave birth to her 10th and 11th children - both born out of wedlock. Even though Buelin had not had any children and was not sexually active, she was scheduled for surgery with her mother's approval.

The surgery left her devastated and with a string of medical problems that may be related to the procedure. Because of that, her nephew would like to see the state compensate the victims with cash.

"I hope she gets some compensation. I do," Hersie McMillian said.

But Buelin is not sure if the state could ever do enough to make up for what it took.

"That won't change a thing," she said about compensation. "There's nothing that's going to be done, but there should be more than a verbal apology."

Buelin was 14 when a social worker met her at the end of a dirt road near her house. The social worker said that they were going to the hospital.

Buelin asked why.

Surgery, the social worker said. "You have appendicitis."

Buelin had never heard of it, and she didn't seem to have much choice anyway. She had the surgery. Soon afterward, she was home and back to her usual routine of helping her mother carry water, work in the vegetable garden and take care of the family's animals.

Buelin didn't find out what had really happened until several years later. A pain in her side sent her to the hospital when she was 21. Doctors found and removed a cyst from one of her ovaries.

After the surgery, Buelin found out something else that would hurt much more than the cyst.

"They said I had my tubes tied," she said. "My doctor told me, asked me when I had this done. I said I didn't know when I had this done."

Tubes were tied, cut
Her Fallopian tubes had been not just tied, but also cut. Buelin realized that she would never have children.

"It was just like my heart was going to come out of my body. It felt like my heart would split open," she said. "It looks to me like they would have thought, 'This young-un might want to have children someday; why not just tie them?'"

Her husband at the time, Alvin Flippin, told her that he didn't mind that she couldn't have children - he didn't want any anyway. They talked about adopting, but he didn't want that, either.

Buelin let the matter drop. But she thought about what had been taken from her.

"I just think a pregnant woman is the prettiest thing I ever seen. They look miserable but they're pretty," she said. "One of the hardest things that has bothered me about this thing, aside from not having children, was when people would talk about their children or grandchildren."

But Buelin grew up in a family that knew how to do without. Her mother married a much older man when she was only 15 and started having children right away. Two died, one stillborn and one shortly after birth. She had her 11th when she was 33.

The children helped out with everything. They churned butter and tended large vegetable gardens and 16 acres of tobacco. They carried water from the spring.

There was no electricity, so the children cut wood to do everything from cook their food to cure tobacco. Everything was valuable. Hersie McMillian, Buelin's nephew, has a quilt that his grandmother made from the twine that bound leaves of tobacco.

"It was from sunup to sundown," Buelin said. "I thought when mama was successful enough to get a refrigerator that we were rich."

Her older sister, Willie Mae, moved out before Buelin was 14. Her mother allowed Buelin's youngest sister, Betty Jane, to move in with a local minister.

"Betty Jane was just a bookworm and mama just didn't have the means to send her to school," Buelin said. "My mama let a preacher and his wife take my baby sister and raise her and send her to school.... It was so sad."

That left just Buelin and her next-younger sister at home when the social worker came.

Buelin thinks that her mother's actions might have drawn attention from the county department of public welfare.

After Elsie Woods gave birth to her ninth child, her husband developed dementia and went to live in a home in Macon, Ga. He died two years later.

After he left, Elsie Woods became pregnant with another man's child, a boy. After his birth, a social worker approached Woods, Buelin said

Sterilization may have been a condition of receiving welfare; Buelin isn't sure. She only knows that one morning, her mother told her to go to the end of that dirt road and wait.

Her mother gave birth to another illegitimate child, another son, the next year, Buelin said. Then, Buelin thinks, the eugenics board had Elsie Woods sterilized.

"They did mama's in '52 when Charles was born. I knew after he was born she had to go back to the hospital," Buelin said. "She was probably glad."

Buelin was the only child in the family to be sterilized. She thinks that her younger sister's stubbornness saved her from the same fate.

A difficult conversation
Later in her life, Buelin gathered the courage to talk to her mother about the ordeal.

"I asked mama if she gave them permission to do this and she said absolutely not," Buelin said.

But she had. A paper that her nephew found among his grandfather's papers showed that Woods had given permission for the state to sterilize her daughter.

Buelin said she doesn't hold it against her mother.

"She did the best she could. She had all nine of us," she said. "I wouldn't put my mama down. She's like me; she didn't have a lot of education."

Buelin spent her life working in textile mills. The industry's history in this state can be charted through a list of the places she worked - Brown and Wooten, Renfrow, Kentucky Derby, Spencer's.

She also worked at Wayne's Poultry Farm for a while. That's where she earned her nickname, Ducky, because of the way she looked wearing large boots over her shoes.

Her first husband died of cancer in 1972. She remarried 12 years later, to Woodrow Buelin. They are still married.

With Woodrow, Buelin acquired seven stepchildren.

"There's nobody in the world who loves their stepmother more," Hersie McMillan said. "If you ever saw her with a bunch of children. It makes you ashamed - makes you ashamed of your government."

She is retired now and does not have health insurance. She tried to find some that would be affordable, but her health history - she's had two heart attacks - made that impossible.

She has had other problems that she thinks could be related to her unwanted tubal ligation. Seven years after she went through menopause at age 45, Buelin began menstruating again. She had to have a minor surgical procedure to take care of it. There was the cyst. And the scar that she still puts Vaseline on, every day.

And there are other things, Buelin said.

"I do think it's had something to do with my health because I'm real easy to get upset, I get real nervous," she said.

Her stepchildren and many of her friends still don't know what happened to Buelin, or Annie, as her family calls her. Buelin said she's ashamed of having been sterilized.

"I'm sure they probably all wonder why I never had children," she said.

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