Virginia Ran A Secret Eugenics Program That Didn’t End Until 1979
The story of Carrie Buck, a woman who was sterilized after being sexually assaulted, underscores the draconian nature of the legislation
Eugenics was popular in the United States long before Nazis like Dr. Josef Mengele used it as a pretext to conduct crimes against humanity and to promote ‘racial purity.’ In the state of Virginia, eugenics laws persisted well into the later part of the 20th century — sterilization was legal there until 1979 to keep those deemed mentally unfit from procreating and to prevent “miscegenation,” that is, interracial couples producing offspring.
The victims of Virginia’s draconian sterilization laws number at around 8,000 individuals, and they include a woman named Carrie Buck who was declared “feebleminded” after she was raped and her foster family had her committed.
Along with sterilization, eugenicists promoted the “science of racial purity” by arguing that interracial marriage harmed America’s purity. On the same day that Virginia passed the law that sterilized Buck, they also passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made it a crime for whites to marry non-whites. That law would not be overturned until Loving…
