Alone with haunting memories in her Connecticut home, Ernestine Moore spent much of last winter waiting to hear what Gov. Mike Easley would do for her and thousands of others sterilized by the state of North Carolina from 1929 through 1974.

This week, she heard what the state was offering -mainly, education and health credits. For Moore, it was too little too late.

"That's all they're offering?" she asked from her Bridgeport home. "I'm not satisfied with that. They really messed up my life," said Moore, who was sterilized in Pitt County in 1965 after having her first and only child. She was 14.

Moore wants money for her pain.

Ted Gartman Jr. of Greenville, who signed off on Moore's sterilization as the local director of public welfare, isn't sure that financial compensation is the answer. He said that the sterilization program wasn't one of "unfettered power," of someone just sitting down and deciding to have a male or female sterilized.

"It may have been misused.... I'd like to think in our agency it wasn't, but it's conceivable it could have been," said Gartman.

Her long silence
In 1965, Moore was living with her mother and seven brothers and sisters in a four-room house in Fountain, a small town outside Greenville in Pitt County.

She got pregnant by a boyfriend, she said. She remembers a visit to a clinic, where a white social worker encouraged her to be sterilized after the birth of her child. "I really didn't want them to do that," she said. "They told me if I didn't do it, my mother would be cut off welfare. If I didn't do it, they'd take my child away and put it in a home. I had to do something."

Both Moore and her mother signed a consent form for her to be sterilized.

The petition for the operation included test results that classified Moore as feeble-minded.

"If I were feeble-minded like they said, seemed like they would have put me in an institution," she said.

She gave birth to a daughter, Sharon Diane Moore, on Aug. 29, 1965, at Pitt County Memorial Hospital. The next day, she said, she was sterilized.

Moore said she remembers hearing doctors talking during the operation.

"I heard them saying they really didn't want to do it. They said I was too young for them to do it."

No one told her the operation was irreversible, she said, and she received no counseling in the days after it.

Two years after the operation, Moore and her daughter moved to Bridgeport, where friends from North Carolina were already living. She worked as a nurse's aide, she said, and in factories.

She said she entered into a relationship and wanted to have another baby, but couldn't get pregnant. Her doctor sent for her records from Greenville, she said, and that's when she learned her sterilization was irreversible.

Like others sterilized, she didn't talk about it. "I kept that secret from the world," she said. "I was kind of ashamed of it."

Moore said she never told her daughter about what happened. Police say that Sharon Moore committed suicide by hanging herself in 1995. Moore believes that her daughter was murdered.

Ernestine Moore, divorced, is now alone, save for visits from her daughter's two grown children.

"I don't have a daughter no more and I couldn't have no more kids. See, I don't have nobody."

Confronting the past
This winter, Moore realized she wasn't alone in her pain after a friend in North Carolina sent her a newspaper story about a committee set up to study the state sterilization program, and stories about the testimony that others had given.

Moore sent off for records from the state archives in Raleigh and a few weeks later she got a letter from the state. She tore it open, finding copies of typewritten forms about her that she had never seen. The words describing her at 14 chilled and angered her.

On one page, social worker Jo Ann Smith wrote that it was hard to discern Moore's feeling about being sterilized. "(Moore) is so withdrawn that worker has been unable to detect any emotion other than fear."

On another page, Smith wrote that most of the people in Moore's neighborhood were "of low incomes and low morals." Eugenics-board records are filled with similar petitions, ones that read more like gossip than sociological analysis.

"A whole lot of them things they said were not true," Moore said. "She didn't know nothing about them people."

Included in the petition was a test report that said Moore had an IQ of 56. But the report also said that "Ernestine has no appearance of retardation" and "the exact test score is undoubtedly a minimal estimate of her potential."

As in numerous other state sterilization cases, the psychologist who gave the IQ test did not refer to feeble-mindedness. In Moore's case, as in many others, a doctor made a check by "feeble-minded" on a form in the petition. Dr. Harold Hoke wrote on the form that he had just met Moore the day he filled out the form.

As Moore read the words, she said, she decided it was time to break her silence, set the record straight and seek compensation for what happened.

Unfinished business
Gartman, 66, went on to teach social work at East Carolina University in Greenville before retiring. Like many of those involved in the sterilization program, he has mixed feelings about it.

Sterilization in the South was probably "something of a poverty control thing" aimed primarily at blacks, he said, but whites were sterilized as well.

"The community feeling that I got was 'We've got these people on welfare and they keep having children and we've got to do something about it.'"

Yet, he said, some parents, including those of mentally handicapped children, asked that they undergo the operation.

"In those days, we didn't have the pill.... Believe it or not there were parents and relatives who came to our agencies begging for this."

There might be people who deserve compensation for being sterilized, he said, but "I have a hard time saying that anybody who was sterilized ought to be compensated for it.... I don't think money is the answer to everything."

He doesn't remember Moore's case.

"The only thing I can say is I regret if the system was flawed in any way," he said.

Moore says that the sterilization program was systemically flawed and the state should pay for her suffering. She said she plans to get a lawyer to pursue reparations and to speak out about what happened to her.

"I'm not finished with this. And they did that to a lot of people."

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