"RICHMOND -- Virginia could ensure that its forced sterilization policies of the past would never be repeated by creating an independent protection and advocacy agency for the disabled, a coalition of advocacy groups said.

``There is no better way for Virginia to apologize to the victims of past abuse than to ensure that such abuses do not occur in the future,'' according to Citizens for Rights of Virginians with Disabilities.

This year's General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to make the state Department for the Rights of Virginians with Disabilities independent of state government, as such agencies are in most states. Gov. Jim Gilmore opposes the idea, and the letter urges legislators to overturn a veto if Gilmore rejects the independence measure.

Virginia forcibly sterilized 7,450 people, mostly teen-agers and young adults, as part of a phony science called eugenics. Sterilizations were carried out from 1915 to 1979, when the last eugenics language was removed from state law.

The state's Southern aristocracy, operating under a state law that served as a model for the rest of the nation, tried to purify the white race by targeting virtually any human shortcoming they believed was a hereditary disease that could be stamped out by surgical sterilization. Such maladies included mental illness, mental retardation, criminal behavior, alcoholism, syphilis and immorality.

Eugenics was eventually discredited as political and social prejudice rather than scientific fact.

Neither Virginia nor any of the 29 other states that conducted eugenical sterilizations ever compensated, apologized or memorialized the more than 60,000 eugenics victims, The Associated Press reported on March 19.

``I am sure that you join me in being shocked by the recent news reports on the involuntary sterilizations inflicted on residents of Virginia's'' mental institutions, coalition official Valerie L. Marsh said in her letter to legislators. ``It is horrifying to learn that Virginia was at the center of the eugenics movement in the United States.''

It is not known how many sterilization victims are still alive. About 10 live on one block in Lynchburg not far from the old Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded where most Virginia sterilizations were carried out.

Experts on the eugenics movement say Virginia's law, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, had a dramatic impact in Germany, where Adolf Hitler's 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases contained language that echoed the Virginia statute. The Nazis forcibly sterilized 2 million people and carried the racial purity policy a step further by murdering millions in the Holocaust.

At the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, the Virginia law was cited by attorneys for accused Nazis as the precedent for the Nazi race cleansing programs.

The 1927 Supreme Court ruling on Virginia's eugenics law still stands as the constitutional standard on involuntary sterilization, prompting a federal judge in 1984 to throw out a class-action lawsuit filed by Virginia's eugenics victims.

Virginia named its DeJarnette Center, a children's psychiatric hospital in Staunton, after one of the state's most zealous eugenicists, Dr. Joseph S. DeJarnette, director of Western State Hospital for 50 years.

``Leave it to Virginia to name a hospital after someone who systematically tortured vulnerable people,'' said Marsh, executive director of the Virginia chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. ``I'm embarrassed and ashamed.''

Reed Boatright, spokesman for the state mental health department, said Wednesday the agency and Gilmore are considering renaming the DeJarnette Center because of DeJarnette's association with the eugenics movement.

The coalition of advocacy groups includes the National Alliance for the Mental Ill-Virginia, the Arc of Virginia, the Virginia Coalition for the Homeless, and the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union" (Bill Baskervill, Pilot Online, March 30, 2000).