• States like California, North Carolina and Virginia often take the focus due to the sheer number of procedures, even though Delaware’s rate of sterilization regularly outpaced them.
  • Delaware has never formally apologized for sterilizing an upwards of likely 1,500 people. It wasn’t until this fall that involuntary sterilizations were repealed from state law.
  • Many of the women who were sterilized were viewed to be promiscuous, social menaces or unfit mothers who failed to properly take care of their children.

In August of 1930, Ethel Benson was institutionalized into the Delaware Colony for the Feeble Minded and never returned home.

She was about 20 years old, Black and illiterate. Her great sin, in the eyes of Delaware, was that she was an unmarried woman who gave birth to two children – both fathered by different white men. 

The label of “procreative menace” was often slapped on women like Ethel.

While institutionalized, she underwent a procedure to correct these supposed emotional defects. A doctor, with one of Delaware’s most prominent last names, made an incision into Ethel’s abdomen. He removed both of her fallopian tubes. He also cut out her clitoris. 

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