Friday February 27, 2015 06:47 PM

The Associated Press

(c) 2015, The Washington Post.

RICHMOND, Va. The Virginia General Assembly has agreed to compensate individuals who were forcibly sterilized under the 20th-century practice of eugenics.

A budget passed by both chambers Thursday, and awaiting the governor's signature, set aside $400,000 or $25,000 each for victims and their estates.

The appropriation, championed this year by Del. Benjamin Cline, R-Rockbridge, makes Virginia the second state to take such action among more than 30 that forcibly sterilized its residents. North Carolina was the first.

"I'm very pleased we've finally taken this necessary step towards acknowledging the wrongdoing that was done by the state," Cline said. "When someone is denied the ability to have a family, that's a tragedy, but when it's denied to them by their government, that is a scandal and a wrong that needs to be made right."

Gov. Terry McAuliffe's spokesman, Brian Coy, declined to say if the governor favors compensation. While running for office, McAuliffe, a Democrat, said he supported the formal apology offered by Virginia for eugenics, but he did not take a position on payouts.

The Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act, signed into law on March 20, 1924, declared that "heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy, and crime."

It had the blessing of doctors and scientists at the University of Virginia and elsewhere. Under its provisions, people who were confined to state institutions because of mental illness, mental retardation or epilepsy could be sterilized as a "benefit both to themselves and society."

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Va. agrees to compensate individuals who were forcibly sterilized