Buck v. Bell

Buck v. Bell,, 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&mdash;the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating "defectives" from the gene pool.

Background
In 1924, the commonwealth 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. Albert Sidney Priddy, superintendent of the Virginia 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 whom he claimed had a mental age of 9. Priddy maintained that Buck represented a genetic threat to society. According to Priddy, Buck's 52-year-old mother possessed a mental age of 8 and had a record of prostitution and immorality. 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. It was later discovered that Carrie's pregnancy was not caused by any act of "immorality" on her own part. In the summer of 1923, while her adoptive mother was away "on account of some illness," her nephew raped Carrie, and her later commitment has been seen as an attempt by the family to save their reputation.

The case
While the litigation was making its way through the court system, Priddy died and his successor, Dr. James Hendren 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.

The appellate court 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, in an 8-1 decision, 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.. In support of his argument that the interest of the states in a "pure" gene pool outweighed the interest of individuals in their bodily integrity, he argued:
 * We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It 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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.

Holmes concluded his argument with the infamous phrase:
 * Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

The sole dissenter in the court, Justice Pierce Butler, declined to write a minority opinion.

Carrie Buck was operated upon, receiving a compulsory salpingectomy (a form of tubal ligation). She was later paroled from the institution as a domestic worker to a family in Bland, Virginia. She was an avid reader until her death in 1983. Her daughter Vivian, who was also sterilized, did very well in her two years of schooling, once being on the school's honor roll. She died at the age of eight.

The historian Paul A. Lombardo has influentially argued in a 1985 article in the New York University Law Review that Buck was not "feeble-minded" at all, but that the entire case was built around the fact that Carrie was raped by the nephew of her adoptive mother.

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 whom 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 quandary to discourage many sterilizations. By 1963, sterilization laws were almost wholly out of use, though some remained officially on the books for many years. Virginia's state sterilization law was repealed in 1974.

The story of Carrie Buck's sterilization and the court case was made into a television drama in 1994, Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story.