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Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell

Amazon.com Price:  $25.05 (as of 20/04/2019 10:37 PST- Details)

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Description

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. within the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents to be able to prevent “feebleminded and socially inadequate” people from having children. It’s 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 used to be 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 used to be destined to lose the case before it had even begun. Neither Carrie Buck nor her mother and daughter were the “imbeciles” condemned within the Holmes opinion. Her lawyer―a founder of the institution where she used to be held―never challenged Virginia’s arguments and known as no witnesses on Buck’s behalf. And judges who heard her case, from state courts as much as the U.S. Supreme Court, sympathized with the eugenics movement. Virginia had Carrie Buck sterilized in a while after the 1927 decision.

Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the US and used to be cited on the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. Three Generations, No Imbeciles tracks the notorious case through its history, revealing that it remains a potent symbol of government keep an eye on of reproduction and a troubling precedent for the human genome era.


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