Apologize for eugenics.

Byline: The Register-Guard

News that records of Oregon's eugenics program have been shredded lends special urgency to a request that Gov. John Kitzhaber issue an apology to the 2,650 people who were forcibly sterilized by the state. These people were victims of a dangerously misguided policy that continued long after it was discredited; an apology is the least they should expect. And now, with the records of their mistreatment having been destroyed, an apology is needed to ensure that Oregon's practice of eugenics is not forgotten.

Eugenics, the idea that a human population can be improved through selective breeding, was intellectually respectable through much of the 20th century. It wasn't widely rejected until Adolf Hitler showed the appalling abuses that follow when a powerful group puts eugenics to work to prevent reproduction by people deemed undesirable. A government that claims the power to define groups as being undesirable bears the mark of totalitarianism.

Oregon's eugenics statute was adopted in 1917, and was modeled after a Virginia law that also became the basis of Nazi Germany's program of weeding out people called "useless eaters." Oregon's law created a State Board of Eugenics, whose duties were "To examine into the innate traits, the mental and physical conditions, the personal records, and the family traits and histories, of all feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates and sexual perverts reported to it who will probably become social menaces or wards of the state, and to direct the superintendent of the institution in which the inmate is confined to perform or cause to be performed such type of sterilization as may be deemed best by said board."

In 1967, the board was renamed the State Board of Social Protection, and the description of its duties was changed: "The Board examines individuals for whom sterilization has been recommended; if, in the judgment of a majority of the board, procreation by the individual would produce children who would have an inherited tendency to mental retardation or mental illness, or who would become neglected or dependent children as a result of the parent's illness or retardation, the board orders the type of sterilization best suited to the person's condition."

It wasn't until 1983 that the Legislature abolished the board, which had become largely inactive. John Kitzhaber, then a state senator, made the motion to bring Oregon's 66-year eugenics program to an end. During that history, according to The (Portland) Oregonian, 2,650 people in state hospitals and prisons were sterilized. The Associated Press reports that 30 states had eugenics programs, of which Oregon's was the ninth largest. The government had assumed power that should belong to individuals and their families, and used it to deny a basic human right.

The Oregonian sought to obtain records relating to sterilizations, and found that many had been shredded. While there's no evidence that the destruction of the records involved any illegality, it's likely that they were shredded because officials recognized that they contained material that would be embarrassing to the state. Bill Lynch, head of planning and public relations for the state Council on Developmental Disabilities, says sterilizations were often employed to enforce a moral code, or as punishment. It will now be much harder to reconstruct this not-so-distant chapter of Oregon's past, and to determine who was sterilized and why.

The disabilities council is one of 17 organizations that have asked Gov. Kitzhaber to issue an apology for the eugenics program. The coalition is not seeking compensation for any surviving victims of sterilization. Oregon would become the second state to issue such an apology - Virginia, the state that pioneered eugenics as public policy, became the first in May. Both of Oregon's leading gubernatorial candidates, Republican Kevin Mannix and Democrat Ted Kulongoski, say an apology is deserved.

Mannix and Kulongoski are right. A clear apology from the governor on behalf of all Oregonians - acknowledging the existence of the eugenics program, condemning it as a violation of human rights, apologizing for it and promising that it won't be repeated - would be helpful. The victims are certainly entitled to such an apology. More than that, Oregonians should be willing to face ugly aspects of their own history, and refuse to permit the destruction of records to erase them from memory. People who won't recognize the errors of the past are poorly equipped to prevent them from happening again.