Buck v. Bell
Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) was the United States Supreme Court ruling that upheld a statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded "for the protection and health of the state." It was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics -- the pseudoscience to improve the human race by eliminating "defectives" from the gene pool.
In 1924, the state of Virginia adopted a statute authorizing the compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded for the purpose of eugenics. On September 10 of the same year, Dr. A.S. Priddy, superintendent of the Viginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, filed a petition to his Board of Directors to sterilize Carrie Buck, an 18 year old patient at his institution who he claimed had a mental age of 9. Priddy maintained that Buck represented a genetic threat to society. Buck's mother, then 52 years old with (according to the Colony superintendents) a mental age of 8, had a record of prostitution and immorality, claimed Priddy. She had three children without good knowledge of their parentage. Carrie, one of these children, had been adopted and attended school for five years, reaching the level of sixth grade. However, according to Priddy, she had eventually proved to be "incorrigible" and eventually gave birth to an illegitimate child. Her adopted family had committed her to the State Colony as "feeble-minded" (a catch-all term used at the time for the mentally disabled), no longer feeling capable of caring for her.
While the litigation was making its way through the court system, Priddy died and his successor, Dr. James H. Bell, was substituted to the case. The Board of Directors issued an order for the sterilization of Buck, and her guardian appealed the case to the Circuit Court of Amherst County, which sustained the decision of the Board. The case then moved to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, which again sustained the sterilization law as compliant with both the state and federal constitutions, and it then went to the United States Supreme Court. The plaintiff's lawyers argued that this procedure ran counter to the protections of the 14th Amendment.
On May 2, 1927, the Court accepted that she, her mother and her daughter were "feeble-minded" and "promiscuous," and that it was in the state's interest to have her sterilized. The ruling legitimized Virginia's sterilization procedures until they were repealed in 1974.
The ruling was written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and included the infamous phrase "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Holmes' argument was primarily that if the state was empowered to order vaccination for various diseases (such as tuberculosis), they were similarly empowered over the ability to reproduce if it presented a strong threat to society. It was not an unpopular line of thinking in its day.
Carrie Buck was operated upon, receiving a compulsory salpingectomy (a form of tubal ligation). She was later paroled from the institution.
Paleontologist and popular science author Stephen Jay Gould claimed that not only was Carrie Buck probably not actually "feeble-minded," but that her daughter Vivian (also sterilized) was not either. He has also claimed that the prosecution and defense were in collusion on the case (in any event, Carrie Buck's defense was not argued vigorously). Among academic historians however there is no decisive conclusion on either matter.
The effect of the ruling
The effect of Buck v. Bell was to legitimize eugenic sterilization laws in the United States as a whole. While many states already had sterilization laws on their books, their use was erratic and effects practically non-existent in every state except for California. After Buck v. Bell, dozens of states added new sterilization statutes, or updated their constitutionally non-functional ones already enacted, with statutes which more closely mirrored the Virginia statute upheld by the Court.
The Virginia statute which the ruling of Buck v. Bell supported was designed in part by the eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin, superintendent of Charles Benedict Davenport's Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Laughlin had a few years previously conducted a number of studies on the enforcement of sterilization legislation throughout the country and had concluded that the reason for their lack of use was primarily that the physicians who would order the sterilizations were afraid of prosecution by patients who they operated upon. Laughlin saw the need to create a "Model Law" which could withstand a test of constitutional scrutiny, clearing the way for future sterilization operations.
Sterilization rates under eugenic laws in the United States climbed from 1927 until Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942). While Skinner v. Oklahoma did not specifically overturn Buck v. Bell, it created enough of a legal quandry to discourage many sterilizations. By 1963, sterilization laws were almost wholly out of use, though some remained officially on the books for many years.
See also
External link
- A rather thorough account of the case on the site of the Dolan DNA Learning Center
- The full text of Justice Holmes's Opinion
References
- Gould, Stephen Jay, "Carrie Buck's Daughter"; Reprinted in The Flamingo's Smile, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985, pp. 307-313.
- Kevles, Daniel J., In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, New York: Knopf, 1985.