California once forcibly sterilized people by the thousands. Now the victims may get reparations.

A brutal chapter in American history began in 1909 with the stroke of a doctor’s pen.

California’s eugenics law, enacted that year, allowed medical officials to order the forced sterilization of people they deemed “feebleminded” or otherwise unfit to have children. Over the next seven decades, they carried out the surgeries at an industrial scale. More than 20,000 people, many of them with disabilities or psychiatric disorders, went under the knife in a campaign so efficient Germany’s Nazis took notice.