WS Chronicle

As the N.C. General Assembly considers compensation for victims of a state-run forced-sterilization program, Wake Forest University will host “Scarred for Life: The Legacy of Forced Sterilization at Home and Abroad,” April 4-5 in Annenberg Auditorium in Carswell Hall on the Reynolda Campus.

The conference, which is free and open to the public, will examine the history of the eugenics movement and its expression in North Carolina and Central Europe, and examine what lessons can be learned from the past as the world heads into the genomic revolution. It will open on April 4 at 5 p.m. with a screening of the topical documentary “Screening of Wicked Silence” and a panel discussion featuring journalist Kevin Begos, WFU history professor Simone M. Caron and Charmaine Fuller Cooper, the former director of the N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, which was established to provide justice and compensate victims who were forcibly sterilized.

Events on Friday, April 5 begin at 2 p.m. Guests will include Daniel J. Kevles, the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, and author of books “In the Name of Eugenics,” “The Physicists” and “The Baltimore Case;” civil rights attorney Adam Stein; Angela Kocze, a Hungarian visiting Fulbright scholar who will speak on the forced sterilization of Roma women in Central Europe; and Nancy M. P. King, a professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy and Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine.