Buck v. Bell

Carrie Buck is seventeen when her foster family's nephew rapes her and she becomes pregnant. The family has her committed to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, the same institution that holds her mother. Virginia has just passed a law authorizing compulsory sterilization of the "feebleminded," and the Colony's superintendent selects Carrie as the test case. Her court-appointed lawyer is a founder of the very Colony that wants her sterilized, and puts on almost no defense. The evidence that Carrie, her mother, and her infant daughter Vivian are all "defective" is thin to the point of fabrication: Vivian will later make her school's honor roll. The case is built to lose, and it reaches the Supreme Court.

Virginia argues that if the state can call citizens to die in war and require vaccination for public health, it can ask a lesser sacrifice of those it deems unfit to prevent the state from being "swamped with incompetence." Buck's side argues that the state is claiming power over the bodies of its poorest and least defended citizens on junk science, without meaningful process, and that a government that can sterilize anyone it labels unfit has no limiting principle at all.

The Court sided with Virginia, 8-1, and the opinion's cruelty is part of the record: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Around 70,000 Americans were sterilized under laws the decision blessed. Nazi defendants cited it at Nuremberg. Skinner v. Oklahoma narrowed it in 1942, but Buck v. Bell has never been expressly overruled. The deliberation here is not whether the Court was right, almost no one now says it was, but what the case teaches about how confident majorities, respected judges, and settled science can produce an atrocity with full legal process.