Advocates for North Carolinas eugenics victims are asking state lawmakers to close what they see as a loophole that may be making victims ineligible for compensation.

More than 7,000 people were involuntarily sterilized under North Carolinas decadeslong eugenics program.

So far the state has awarded $4.4 million to 220 victims. But hundreds more could be ineligible because of the way a 2013 law was written.

Lawmakers created a $10 million fund for people sterilized under the authority of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina. Thats been interpreted to exclude people sterilized by local health or welfare officials, not by the state eugenics board.

But Elizabeth Haddix, senior staff attorney for the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights, which has represented victims, said the local officials played a pivotal role in implementing the state eugenics policy.

There is no question that eugenics victims excluded from compensation were sterilized by state actors against their will, and therefore are plainly part of the class that the (compensation) statute was designed to reach, she wrote to House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger.

Shelly Carver, a spokesman for Berger, a Rockingham County Republican, said it is too early to speculate on what might happen during the legislative process. Moore, a Republican from Cleveland County, said he is reviewing the proposal.

Any changes to the 2013 law could meet resistance.

Sen. Tommy Tucker, a Union County Republican who co-chairs the Senates appropriations committee on Health and Human Services, said the states done its part.

They should go to the county where they were sterilized, not the state, he said of those victims. The states done its part to right the wrongs that we did, but the county should be responsible for what it did.

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Victim advocates want to close eugenics loophole