1927

Supreme Court, in 8-1 decision, rules in favor of sterilization of feebleminded Carrie Buck in Buck v. Bell, with Oliver Wendell Holmes arguing that “the same principle that justifies compulsory vaccination – that is, precedence of the public welfare over the rights of the individual in the prevention of infectious diseases – holds in regard to involuntary sterilization as well” (Davidovitch, 25-26; Hansen & King, ch 6). In case in question, Holmes ordered sterilization of allegedly imbecilic poor white girl Carrie Buck, remarking, with reference to Carrie, her mother, and her infant daughter, “Three generations of imbecility are enough” (Montgomery, 280). Holmes’ claim and the trial, as the preceding trials in Appeals Court and Va. State Supreme Court were all fraudulent, with the facts and circumstances of Carrie’s life “have been exposed as partially inaccurate or entirely false”, e.g., she was pregnant because the nephew of her adoptive parents . . . had raped her” (111). The case was brought by Albert Priddy, superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, and State Senator Aubrey Strode, who drafted the state’s coercive sterilization bill of 1924. Priddy had been sued successfully by the husband of a resident he had sterilized, and sought an air-tight guarantee of the constitutionality of involuntary sterilization per the State’s 1924 state law of “insane, idiotic, imbecilic, feeble-minded, or epileptic, and by the law of heredity is the probably potential parent of socially inadequate offspring likewise afflicted” (Hansen & King, 104). After Buck, eugenic sterilization became lawful in the U.S., “fusing sterilization and eugenics in the public mind” (Ladd-Taylor, Intro; Hansen & King, 110). But the case itself, culminating in “the extraordinary pro-eugenic argument endorsed by an almost brazenly biased U.S. Supreme Court . . . manipulated the judicial system not to serve justice but, rather, to produce a predetermined result” (Hansen & King, 113-114).