Beyond the human effect though, there was something just so ugly about this decision and when think about what we want the Supreme Court to be, what the founders wanted the Supreme Court to be, it was supposed to be our temple of justice, the place that people could go when all the other parts of our society, all the other parts of the government, were not treating them right. Also, we have to factor in all the many people who were being segregated, who were being held in these institutions for eugenic reasons, because they were feebleminded, whose lives unfolded living in places like the colony, rather than living in freedom. If you start by just looking at all the human misery that was inflicted, about 70,000 Americans were sterilized as a result of this decision, so that's an awful lot of people who wanted to have children who weren't able to have children. Bell to be one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history He chooses her, and then under the Virginia law, they have to have a sterilization hearing at the colony, which they do and they give her a lawyer (who is really not a lawyer for her it's really someone who had been the chairman of the board of the colony and was sympathetic to the colony's side) and they have a bit of a sham hearing where she is determined to be a suitable person for sterilization they vote to sterilize her, and that is the order that then gets challenged by Carrie as the plaintiff first in the Virginia court system and then in the Supreme Court. So he fixes on her and thinks Carrie Buck is going to be the perfect potential plaintiff. The fact that she had been pregnant out of wedlock was another strike against her. She is deemed to be feebleminded, she has a mother who is feebleminded, so that's good because you can show some genetics, and then they're hoping that baby could be determined to be feebleminded too, then you could really show a genetic pattern of feeblemindedness. He's looking for someone to put at the center of this test case that they want to bring, so he's looking for someone to sterilize, and he sees Carrie Buck when she comes in, he does the examination himself, and there are a lot of things about her that excite him. When she's at the colony, the guy who is running the colony, Dr. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Minorities, poor people and 'promiscuous' women were often targeted.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Imbeciles Subtitle The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck Author Adam Cohen The victims of state-mandated sterilization included people like Buck who had been labeled 'mentally deficient,' as well as those who who were deaf, blind and diseased.

'The eugenicists looked at evolution and survival of the fittest, as Darwin was describing it, and they believed 'We can help nature along, if we just plan who reproduces and who doesn't reproduce.' 'Īll told, as many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized during the 20th century. 'There were all kinds of categories of people who were deemed to be unfit ,' Cohen says. Bell was considered a victory for America's eugenics movement, an early 20th century school of thought that emphasized biological determinism and actively sought to 'breed out' traits that were considered undesirable. Bell, centered on a young woman named Carrie Buck, whom the state of Virginia had deemed to be 'feebleminded.'Īuthor Adam Cohen tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that Buck v. Supreme Court decided, by a vote of 8 to 1, to uphold a state's right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate.

I hate people who say keep it a buck