How the Supreme Court allowed forced sterilization of women for 50 years
Should promiscuous, ‘imbecile’ women be allowed to have kids?
“Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” declared the Supreme Court in the Buck v. Bell decision of 1927. “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.”
With those words — written by no less than Oliver Wendell Holmes — forced sterilization became fully legal in the United States.
The case came at the height of popularity for the pseudoscience of eugenics, which maintained that negative character traits like criminality and stupidity were entirely the product of bad genes.
And the unfortunate plaintiff was Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old resident of the a Virginia asylum. Upon arrival at the institution, Buck was diagnosed as “feeble-minded.” She had just given birth, and the state of Virginia claimed that her mother was equally feeble-minded (hence the remark about “three generations of imbeciles”).
What qualified a person for the category “feeble-minded” in those days? As Andrea Denhoed describes in The New Yorker, it was “a capaciously defined condition that was diagnosed using often flawed intelligence tests and by identifying symptoms such as moral degeneracy, an overactive sex drive, and other traits liberally ascribed to poor people (especially poor women) who were seen as having stepped out of line.”
According to the superintendent of the Virginia Colony, in his description of the Buck women, feeble-mindedness didn’t mean mental retardation per se, but rather “a record of immorality, prostitution, untruthfulness and syphilis” — a moral rather than a clinical distinction. In his book Better For All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity, Harry Bruinius describes Carrie as “a normal girl, if sassy and simple and even a little slow.” Eugenicists, however, saw in her evidence of “defective germ-plasm,” and viewed her as a threat to the cleanliness of the American gene pool.
The first state law permitting sterilization for eugenic purposes had been passed in Indiana in 1907, but was overturned in 1921. So America’s leading proponent of the practice, Harry H. Laughlin, wrote even tighter and more foolproof legislation for the state of Virginia. It was passed in 1924, and Carrie Buck was the first person ordered sterilized under the law. Laughlin never met Buck, but he stood in a Virginia courtroom and called her the “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring,” and her family “the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.”
Three years later the case made it to the Supreme Court, which upheld the sterilization of Carrie Buck by a vote of 8 to 1. This decision paved the way for other states to implement laws permitting the medical sterilization of those who, in the words of the Court, “sap the strength of the State,” in order to “prevent our being swamped with incompetence.”
Dozens of states followed suit, with Laughlin leading the charge by publishing flawed eugenic studies and helping draft legislation. Abroad, the consequences of Laughlin’s activism were significant: Laughlin was in contact with German eugenicists, commending them for their devotion to the idea that the “central mission of all politics is race hygiene.” The Nazis returned the admiration. The Third Reich gave Laughlin an honorary degree from Heidelberg University.
At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors literally cited Buck v. Bell in their own defense.
That last bit bears thinking about for a moment.
At home, three overlapping groups suffered disproportionately: women, people of color, and the poor. Eugenicists tended to believe that immoral behavior was evidence of genetic degradation. Since women’s morals were more heavily policed and their sexuality more regulated, they were more likely to be sterilized. “Eugenicists sterilized men and women for different reasons,” writes Rebecca M. Kluchin in Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950–1980. “They sterilized women to control their sexuality; they sterilized men to punish their criminal behavior.” By 1961, over 60,000 people had been sterilized under these laws — and 61% of them were women. In some states, the laws were applied exclusively to young women.
Secondly, eugenicists believed that people of pure Nordic and Anglo-Saxon descent possessed the best genes overall. People of color were already considered genetically sub-par, so if they committed a crime, became pregnant out of wedlock, or performed poorly on an IQ test, the chances of compulsory sterilization were disproportionately high. An illustrative example is Elaine Riddick, a black 13-year-old girl who became pregnant after being raped by a neighbor. “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember,” she recalled. “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.” She didn’t realize she had been medically sterilized until years later, when she was unable to conceive with her husband. In state records, she discovered, she was listed as “promiscuous” and “feeble-minded.”
And finally, for eugenicists, poverty itself was a sign of unfitness and genetic defectiveness. Poor whites and poor people of color alike were thus prime targets for eugenic sterilizations. It’s no coincidence that sterilization laws were implemented in the wake of industrialization. Upper- and middle-class white Americans were alarmed by the increasingly mobile underclass, and instead of turning to economic explanations and solutions to the problems posed by poverty, many believed the eugenic argument that reproduction among the poor was to blame for slums and crime. Animus was particularly directed at poor Southerners, so many of whom “underwent the procedure that it became known as a ‘Mississippi appendectomy,’” notes Denhoed. The 1942 Supreme Court case Skinner v. Oklahoma even went so far as to exclude white-collar criminals from sterilization as punishment, rewriting the law to explicitly target the poor.
Buck v. Bell has never been officially overturned. In 1978, however, one victim of forced sterilization sued the State of Oklahoma before the Supreme Court, and won. The decision resulting from Skinner v. Oklahoma created legal obstacles that effectively put a stop to mass compulsory sterilization. For many, however, it was too little too late. Fifty years of eugenics-driven policy had deprived tens of thousands of Americans of their civil rights.
Plenty of these people are still alive, including many Native American women who underwent coerced sterilization in the 1970s. One of them was experiencing alcohol addiction when a doctor performed a full hysterectomy, promising her she would be able to receive a “womb transplant” if she ever wanted to conceive. She returned years later for the transplant, only to be told no such surgery existed. She left the office in tears.
