It has been 40 years since Elaine Riddick heard the words, but she still remembers them like yesterday: “The doctor told me I had been butchered.”
In 1968, at just 14 years old, Elaine became one of the thousands of victims of North Carolina’s forced sterilization program. Quietly and efficiently operating from 1929 until 1974, the program’s purpose was to weed out the “unfit” of society by stopping them from reproducing.
