In a meeting with constituents last week to discuss plans to reduce the region’s drug problem, Republican state Senator Randy Smith told voters that he planned to sponsor a bill proposing that those convicted of drug offenses voluntarily sterilize themselves to receive a reduced sentence.
“If you want to lessen your prison sentence, if you’re a man, you can get a vasectomy so you can’t produce anymore,” Smith told audience members, according to the Cumberland Times-News. “If you’re a woman, then you get your tubes tied, so you don’t bring any more drug babies into the system.
“Now, you don’t have to. If you don’t, you’re going to jail for a very long time. If you volunteer for the program, then you get a lesser sentence.”
While Smith acknowledged some might say his proposal was “cruel and unfair and violates Constitutional rights,” he argued that “until we cut the head of the snake off…we’re trying to take care of the problem after the fact.”
Newsweek reached out to Smith for comment.
Others, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have already raised concerns about the bill, which they say is tantamount to a state-sponsored eugenics program harkening to policies enacted in the early 20th century.
“Senator Smith’s plainly unconstitutional bill reeks of eugenics,” Eli Baumwell, ACLU-WV’s advocacy director, told Newsweek in a statement. It might sound like an absurd plea for attention—and it is—but it’s also part of a longstanding legislative agenda of punching down on West Virginia’s most vulnerable people.”
While scientific research—and international human rights debates—had largely discredited the practice as early as the 1930s, its prevalence in Nazi Germany kept eugenics in the spotlight well into the ensuing decades, with most U.S. states introducing eugenics legislation at some point in their history.
Investigative reports in California revealed that 144 women were pressured into sterilization between 2005 and 2013, with little or no evidence that officials counseled them or offered alternative treatment, resulting in reparation payments as high as $25,000.
In West Virginia alone, a database maintained by University of Vermont sociologist Lutz Kaelber determined that about 98 people were forced to undergo irreversible birth control procedures under its compulsory sterilization law between 1929 and 1956, the majority of whom were determined by the state to be “mentally ill” or mentally deficient.
And while the number of forced sterilizations performed nationwide will likely forever remain unknown, studies have shown that the vast majority of patients were women of color along with poor whites and the disabled.
In West Virginia—which has the highest drug overdose mortality rate in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the most likely to be impacted would fall on similar lines.
The number of drug offenders admitted each year into West Virginia state prisons notably increased by more than 300 percent between 2000 and 2015, according to a study by the West Virginia Office of Research and Strategic Planning, with drug offenses making up about one-quarter of new admissions.
Of that number, Blacks were three times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, a recent study from the Vera Institute of Justice showed, with the overall Black incarceration rate increasing about 130 percent since 1990.
“Dehumanizing and discriminating against people grappling with substance use disorder has become commonplace for politicians in this state, and it is having deadly consequences,” Baumwell said. “Ignoring evidence-based approaches to addiction and recovery is leading to skyrocketing HIV and overdose rates. ACLU-WV will use everything at our disposal to make sure this hideous bill never becomes law.”
But Smith’s bill also seems to contradict his own statements about “medical freedom” issues like the COVID-19 vaccine.
In a Facebook post calling on Governor Jim Justice to announce a special session to oppose vaccine mandates in the virus-ravaged state last year, Smith said that anyone who feels it’s OK to force someone to inject something into their body to keep their job or their freedom to live their life is “the problem” and “the reason our government is in the shape it’s in.”
“No one should be forced to inject anything into their body,” he wrote. “We aren’t talking about safety equipment, we are talking about your body.”
