'It Ain't Fair'

Old IQ score helped social workers get reluctant teen-ager sterilized

WANCHESE - Bertha Dale Midgett Hymes comes from a place where generations of locals have spilled blood and sweat just surviving.

Hymes, 52, grew up in Wanchese, a fishing village on Roanoke Island where folks take pride in hard work. It is also a place where people struggle to get by and government handouts are sometimes grudgingly accepted. Hymes' family accepted that support. When the social workers who administered the support learned that Hymes, 16, was pregnant and unmarried, they pushed to have the state sterilize her after the birth of her child, saying that she was mentally retarded.

Hymes, who has a heavy speech impediment, doesn't usually talk much about what happened to her. "It's embarrassing, you know. People don't want to hear it. Everybody calls me names, makes fun of me, how I talk," she said.

But with the details of what happened to her and thousands of other North Carolina girls and women emerging, Hymes now wants to tell her story and strains to find the words. "What God gives to you, they take away from you.... I don't think it's right. It ain't fair. I think the government should apologize to me and everyone else."

Hymes is white; the majority of the others ordered to undergo sterilization by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina in the 1960s were black. But like many of those sterilized, she was young and poor and didn't have much chance to voice her objections.

Some social workers - including Hymes' current case worker - now dismiss the work of that board. "I think it was based on junk science," said Sue Judge of the Dare County Department of Social Services. "Basically, it never worked and it certainly worked hardships on individuals."

Hymes bristles as she remembers the operation she underwent at a hospital a half-hour's drive inland from her home. "They cut me. They tied my tubes so I couldn't have any more babies," she said.

Hymes' daughter, Frances Scarborough, 35, sympathizes with her mother. "I don't see where they had a right to take that option away from her," said Scarborough, who is of normal intelligence.

Hymes cooked in fast-food restaurants until taking disability a few years ago. She said she is not mentally retarded, though she has received disability checks from the government for being mentally handicapped. She is illiterate, she said, but can write her name.

She is one of eight children of a ferryboat captain and a homemaker, Dorothy Midgett. Her parents divorced when she was young.

"It was a hard situation when we were growing up," said Hymes' sister, Elsie Sanderling, 57. "We were really like a bunch of animals."

Hymes said that a married man got her pregnant when she was 16. "He said he ain't got me that way. I said, 'I didn't get that way by myself.'... They kicked me out of school because I got pregnant."

Records from the Dare County Department of Public Welfare and from the eugenics board tell the rest of the story, one of Hymes' mother being pushed to consent to the sterilization.

Worker told her that services were available and it was very apparent that Mrs. Midgett was quite hostile toward worker and went on to say that she did not want the Welfare Department to bother anything about it and they would not be willing to accept any services from the agency ... She became more hostile and said that she wanted the Welfare to stay out of her affairs, that she did not want a thing from us, and that she did not invite worker to come back.... When it became apparent that worker could not talk further with Mrs. Midgett, worker left.
- Case notes of Doris Bonner,
a social worker for the Dare County Department of Public Welfare, July 1967

Through the summer and fall of 1967, Bonner visited the Midgett home, encouraging Hymes' mother to let Dale be sterilized. "I just didn't like the idea of it," Dorothy Midgett, 82, said recently.

According to Bonner's notes, the visits started after Hymes' family doctor, W.W. Harvey Jr. of Manteo, called the welfare department about her case. Harvey was concerned because Hymes was pregnant and mentally retarded, Bonner wrote. Harvey was hopeful that she could have an abortion but then realized she was 31/2 months pregnant - too far along to undergo that procedure.

Harvey said that Hymes should be urged to give the baby up for adoption, and that she should be sterilized after giving birth, Bonner wrote.

Bonner and her boss, department director Goldie Meekins, began preparing a sterilization petition to submit to the eugenics board. As part of that petition, they needed a current IQ score.

Bonner and Meekins had the results from an IQ test that Hymes took when she was 11. The test determined that she had a mental age of 5 and that her IQ was 48, well below the cutoff of 70 used to classify the mentally retarded.

A potential problem had surfaced, though. A few years earlier, a lawyer for the eugenics board expressed reservations about using old IQ test results on petitions because of the threat of lawsuits.

But in a letter to Bonner and Meekins, the executive secretary of the eugenics board, Sue Casebolt, said that the old test was all that was needed.

The eugenics board still needed Hymes' mother to sign a consent form. As a minor, Hymes would have no say in the matter.

'Favorable action'

(Hymes) is rather pathetic looking as she is now gaining considerable weight and does not seem to feel too well. However, she seemed rather cheerful. She was dressed in a not-too-clean dark green cotton dress which was full. She showed worker a new brown cotton maternity dress which her sister-in-law had made for her. She was quite thrilled with the new dress, and it seemed more pathetic that she does not really realize her condition and what can happen in the future to her and the baby to be born.
- Bonner case notes, Oct. 4, 1967

Hymes' mother seemed willing to have the sterilization done, Bonner wrote. Midgett said that wasn't true and once even threatened to "call the law" on Bonner when she visited.

Midgett finally agreed to sign the consent form just as Hymes entered Columbia Memorial Hospital to deliver her baby. Midgett said she did so because she was told that her daughter was fragile and having another baby could threaten her life. But medical records do not say that, nor does an exchange of letters between Bonner and Meekins in Manteo and Casebolt in Raleigh that suggests a rush at getting the sterilization done.

The exchange ended with a short note from Casebolt.

On Dec. 2 at 11:14 p.m., Hymes gave birth to Frances. She weighed 5 pounds, 15 ounces. The delivery doctor, Robert Albanese Sr., wrote in hospital notes that Hymes underwent another operation three days later.

Dr. Arthur Bradsher, a surgeon from nearby Windsor, did the operation. Hymes said she talked to Bradsher beforehand. "He said, 'I'm going to sterilize you. Your mama has signed the papers.'

"I said, 'I don't want to be sterilized.' He said, 'You can't do nothing about it.'"

Like many surgeons who performed sterilizations for the eugenics board, Bradsher has since died.

"Bradsher, in fairness to him, he was just trying to help us out," Albanese said recently. "If you interviewed 100 people in those days, I don't think you could have found one who thought it (sterilization) was a bad idea."

Albanese said that although he didn't do sterilizations - he wasn't a surgeon - he understood the reasoning behind them. "There was just unbelievable poverty there; you just couldn't believe it. The idea of them bringing more children into the world in a situation like that just didn't make sense."

In her notes, Bonner wrote that she talked to Albanese about the operation and that he was hopeful that it could be done. Albanese, who now lives in Martinsville, Va., said he couldn't remember Hymes' case but "I have no doubt that I went along with that."

"Looking back ... sure I would regret it," he said. In the scheme of things, he said, sterilizations were a good idea "but if you consider individual rights, it was not a good idea."

'No justice'
In the days after the sterilization, Hymes "complained big-time," Sanderling said. "She cried. I thought at first Dale was going to have a nervous breakdown."

Hymes' mother raised Frances. Hymes lived with them in Wanchese, and Frances at first thought that her mother was an older sister, family members said.

Hymes got married and moved out of the house. Her first marriage ended in divorce, she said. Hymes said she drank for a while, then quit.

"I got married again," Hymes said. "He wanted kids. I told him I couldn't have no more kids because my tubes were tied."

A widow, Hymes subsists on payments from her husband's Social Security account. She owns a mobile home in East Lake, where she lives with her daughter and her two granddaughters.

Sometimes her thoughts turn to her sterilization and the circumstances that led up to it. She is all but alone in those memories.

Most of those involved in having Hymes sterilized are dead now - including Meekins and Bonner. Judge, Hymes' current social worker, joined the county welfare department after the legislature disbanded the eugenics board in 1974. For a while she worked under Bonner, who became the head of the department.

Bonner "certainly tried to do her best for folks," Judge said. Bonner didn't go "out searching for people" to sterilize, she said.

"I think that Mrs. Bonner responded to family requests when families would come in and say to her, 'I have a daughter who's mentally retarded. She's pregnant. I don't want this.'"

Judge declined to comment further.

Hymes looks at her granddaughters, and she thinks of what happened to her and other girls when they weren't much older than them. "It's terrible what they did to the kids. It's hush-hush," she said.

"They didn't give me no justice."

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