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- In 1927, the US Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell set a legal precedent that states may sterilize inmates of public institutions. The court argued that imbecility, epilepsy, and feeblemindedness are hereditary, and that inmates should be prevented from passing these defects to the next generation.
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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.
- 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...
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.
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,"
Oct 3, 2024 · Despite the opposition it faced, eugenic sterilization remained alive in part because of the Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell, which found constitutional the sterilization of Carrie Buck by the State of Virginia. From the beginning, Buck’s sterilization was intended to be a test case.
In the Buck vs. Bell decision of May 2, 1927, the United States Supreme Court upheld a Virginia statute that provided for the eugenic sterilization for people considered genetically unfit. The Court's decision, delivered by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., included the infamous phrase "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
