ATLANTA, Ga., and LITTLETON, N.C.—When Elaine Riddick saw the recently released videos of Planned Parenthood workers picking through the tiny remains of aborted babies, she was horrified. Riddick herself is no stranger to childhood—or reproductive violence.

Her forced sterilization wasn’t an isolated incident. From the 1930s to 1970s, officials from government agencies and eugenics boards across 33 states ordered sterilization for at least 60,000 men, women, and children deemed undesirable or unfit.

Reasons ranged from family poverty to a sweeping, ill-defined category of “feeble-mindedness” that ensnared victims of both below-average and above-average intelligence. Eugenics literature decried the idea of these “morons” bearing children.

The plan behind eugenics—driven by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection (also known as survival of the fittest)—was simple and chilling: Eliminate certain future problems by eliminating certain future people.

Germany adopted similar sterilization laws in the 1930s, and the American movement in part inspired Adolf Hitler in his genocidal campaign to exterminate millions of victims based on his notions of racial superiority.

In North Carolina, five men on the state’s eugenics board regularly gathered in a Raleigh meeting room, reading short files on intended targets, and often condemning them to childlessness.

Officials convinced Riddick’s grandmother—the girl’s guardian—to authorize her sterilization procedure. Her grandmother was poor, illiterate, and afraid. She signed the papers with an X. Riddick had no idea.

A few months later, doctors put Riddick to sleep as the 14-year-old delivered a healthy baby boy. When she awoke, she didn’t know physicians had cut, burned, and tied her fallopian tubes as well.

Riddick suffered chronic health problems, but didn’t know about the sterilization until she married at age 19 and learned she couldn’t conceive children. After a medical exam, she says a doctor told her: “Someone butchered you.”

Read the article “Planned Parenthood and the History of Eugenics and Reproductive Violence in America” on worldmag.com.