CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Paul Lombardo hadn't planned
on a three-decade detour when he stopped at a greasy-spoon
restaurant for breakfast in February 1980. Lombardo, then
a graduate student at the University of Virginia, picked up
a newspaper to read as he ate his bacon and eggs.
And the rest is history, literally and figuratively. For almost
30 years, Lombardo has tried to uncover the full story of
the wrongs he read about that day.
The article he had stumbled across was about two sisters sterilized in the 1920s by the state of Virginia for being "feeble-minded." The younger sister hadn't even known she'd had a tubal ligation. She didn't learn until she was in her late 60s that the surgery hadn't been for appendicitis. The older, more famous sister — Carrie Buck — was the subject of the now infamous lawsuit over the legality of the operation, Buck v. Bell, that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
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He read that although Carrie Buck was the first victim of a 1924 sterilization law, 8,300 Virginians had involuntary sterilization until the practice was stopped in the 1970s. The law itself was repealed in 1974. "It was startling," says Lombardo, 59, now a legal historian at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
