Three generations of imbeciles are enough. Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent feebleminded and socially inadequate people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Paul Lombardo's startling narrative exposes the Buck case's fraudulent roots. In 1924 Carrie Buck-involuntarily institutionalized by the State of Virginia after she was raped and impregnated-challenged the state's plan to sterilize her. Having already judged her mother and daughter mentally deficient, Virginia wanted to make Buck the first person sterilized under a new law designed to prevent hereditarily defective people from reproducing. Lombardo's more than twenty-five years of research and his own interview with Buck before she died demonstrate conclusively that she was destined to lose the case before it had even begun. Neither Carrie Buck nor her mother and daughter were the imbeciles condemned in the Holmes opinion. Her lawyer-a founder of the institution where she was held-never challenged Virginia's arguments and called no witnesses on Buck's behalf. And judges who heard her case, from state courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court, sympathized with the eugenics movement. Virginia had Carrie Buck sterilized shortly after the 1927 decision.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN-13
9780801898242
eBay Product ID (ePID)
92974612
Product Key Features
Author
Paul A. Lombardo
Publication Name
Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck V. Bell