The Dark Legacy of Forced Sterilization: Carrie Buck's Story

The Dark Legacy of Forced Sterilization: Carrie Buck's Story

Blog Article

The tragic legacy of America's eugenics movement.

Key points

• The Buck v. Bell (1927) ruling legalized forced sterilizations under eugenic laws in the U.S.


• Carrie Buck's sterilization was based on flawed judgments of "feeblemindedness" and moral failings.


• Despite being of average intelligence, Carrie Buck and her family were wrongly deemed unfit.


• The Supreme Court's decision in Buck v. Bell has never been overturned, reflecting its lasting impact.


• In an era where reproductive rights are under intense scrutiny, it's worth revisiting a troubling chapter in history: the widespread practice of forced sterilization in the United States.
  
  This controversial practice was institutionalized in the early 20th century and persisted for decades, leaving a dark legacy that still echoes today.
  
  
  

  The Era of Eugenics and Forced Sterilization

  
  From 1907 to 1963, over 64,000 individuals, predominantly women, were forcibly sterilized under eugenics laws in the United States.¹
  
  An integral tool of the eugenics movement in the early 20th century United States, the sterilization laws were intended to prevent "inferior unfit specimens" from diluting "the superior American breeding stock," and thus portrayed those deemed unfit or at risk of being deemed unfit as morally depraved and perverse.


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  Carrie Buck's Story

  
  The two main ways in which the compulsory sterilization laws were disrespectful of women's rights were brought to the fore in Buck v. Bell (1927), where the Supreme Court ruled that compulsory sterilization of an "unfit" individual to protect state interests was constitutional.²
  
  
  In 1924, the board of directors at a mental institution in Virginia issued an order to sterilize the 18-year-old resident Carrie Buck, who they considered to be a genetic threat to society.
  
  Carrie appealed the case, arguing that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment protections of the rights of all adults to be treated equally under the law. The lower courts rejected the appeal, and the case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled 8-1 that Carrie Buck was feeble-minded and promiscuous, and that it, therefore, was in the state's interest to have her sterilized.
  
  
  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who wrote the Court's opinion, argued that the public's interest in avoiding "being swamped with incompetence" outweighed a person's interest in bodily integrity.
  
  The Court further stated that:
  

  [i]t is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. [...] Three generations of imbeciles are enough. [emphasis added] (Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927))

  
  
  
  The sole dissenter, Justice Pierce Butler, did not write a dissenting opinion but as a devout Catholic, his vote may have been shaped by his private belief that any form of birth control, including sterilization, interfered with God's will by blocking the male seed.
  
  The Court's disparaging remark that "three generations of imbeciles are enough" referred to Carrie Buck, her late mother, and her young daughter, who were all judged by the Court to be "imbeciles." This case set a legal precedent that validated eugenics-based sterilization.

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