CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. ? Gov. Mark R. Warner apologized Thursday for Virginia’s forced sterilization of thousands of people from 1924 to 1979, calling it “a shameful effort” that must never be repeated.

Virginia sterilized about 7,450 people under the banner of eugenics, or selective human breeding and engineering.

Thursday, it became the first of the 30 states that conducted such sterilizations to apologize. There were more than 60,000 eugenics victims nationwide.

Warner’s apology coincides with the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell decision upholding Virginia’s eugenics law, which became a model for other states.

“Today, I offer the commonwealth’s sincere apology for Virginia’s participation in eugenics,” the Democratic governor said in the statement. “The eugenics movement was a shameful effort in which state government never should have been involved.”

Del. Mitchell Van Yahres read the statement aloud at the unveiling of a highway marker in Charlottesville honoring the memory of Carrie Buck, who was an 18-year-old unwed mother when she became the first person forcibly sterilized under Virginia’s 1924 law.

The law targeted almost any human shortcoming that was believed to be hereditary, including mental illness, mental retardation, epilepsy, alcoholism and criminal behavior.

Last year, the General Assembly passed a resolution expressing “profound regret” for the state’s role in eugenics, but it stopped short of a formal apology.