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Involuntary sterilization of a woman deemed “feeble-minded”
- One of the most notorious decisions of the Supreme Court was its 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, in which Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld the involuntary sterilization of a woman deemed “feeble-minded” with the chilling justification that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
disabilityjustice.org/right-to-self-determination-freedom-from-involuntary-sterilization/The Right to Self-Determination: Freedom from Involuntary ...
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Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due ...
Feb 12, 2019 · Case Summary of Buck v. Bell: A Virginia statute allowed for the forced sterilization of “feeble minded” people to protect the “health of the state.” Carrie Buck, who was mentally disabled, as was her mother and daughter, was ordered to be sterilized pursuant to the statute.
The judgment finds the facts that have been recited, and that Carrie Buck "is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,"
Mar 7, 2016 · The case, known as Buck v. Bell, centered on a young woman named Carrie Buck, whom the state of Virginia had deemed to be "feebleminded." Author Adam Cohen tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross...
- Facts of The Case
- Legal and Scientific Background
- Appeals Process and Supreme Court
- Legacy
The appellant in Buck v. Bellwas Carrie Elizabeth Buck. In March of that year, the General Assembly passed a law that allowed for the state-enforced sterilization of those deemed genetically unfit for procreation. On September 10, the colony’s board approved a list of sixteen candidates recommended by Superintendent Albert Sidney Priddy for sterili...
Enthusiasm for eugenics coincided with the Progressive Movement, which assumed that society could be improved through laws that encouraged better human behavior. Although eugenic assumptions suggested that such reforms were futile, many Progressives nevertheless embraced the new field, seduced by its modern, scientific connotations. Eugenicists bel...
Whitehead’s brief was less than half as long as Strode’s. It conceded that Carrie Buck was feebleminded while implying the same about her child. Citing the Fourteenth Amendment, he argued that sterilization deprived Buck of due process by violating “her bodily integrity” and of equal protection by targeting only a portion of the state’s feebleminde...
In England, where the eugenics movement had started, sterilization laws never took hold. “I do not say that the law ought not, at some future time, to be extended more widely,” the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in Marriage and Morals(1929). “I say only that our scientific knowledge at present is not adequate for this purpose, and that it is ve...
May 2, 2017 · After several hearings and state court decisions that upheld the Virginia law, Buck v. Bell (for Dr. John H. Bell, who succeeded Priddy as Superintendent following his death) reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927.
The Court found that the statute did not violate the Constitution. Justice Holmes made clear that Buck's challenge was not upon the medical procedure involved but on the process of the substantive law.
