Carrie Buck
Carrie Buck was a seventeen-year-old girl living in a foster home when she was raped, according to some, by a relative of her foster father. She had been out of school since completing the sixth grade, withdrawn by her foster father in order to have her work at home. When it became evident that she was pregnant as a result of the rape her foster father had her committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Madison Heights near Lynchburg. The grounds for her commitment included feeblemindedness and promiscuity.
Carrie delivered her baby in March 1924, and the infant girl was adopted by her former foster father, John Dobbs, after Carrie was declared incompetent to raise her. Carrie’s mother had been placed in the same facility as Carrie many years earlier – the reason she was raised in a foster home – and the officials at the Colony decided to use the Carrie Buck case to test the recently enacted Sterilization Act. The Colony superintendent, Albert Priddy, argued that since both Carrie and her mother, Emma Buck, were designated as feebleminded then any evidence of the same condition in Carrie’s daughter would establish the condition was hereditary.
Aubrey Strode, who had drafted the Sterilization Act, served as counsel for the Colony which argued for the sterilization of Carrie. She was represented by an attorney, Irving Whitehead, himself a eugenicist who offered a weak defense of his client. Harry H. Laughlin, one of America’s most noted eugenicists, provided a written deposition to the court in which he backed up Priddy’s testimony that Carrie’s family were members of that part of society which were, “the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” He had never met Carrie nor any of her family.
Carrie’s baby, named Vivian, was examined by a nurse who informed the court that the infant, then only six months old, exhibited characteristics and traits which indicated that she too was feebleminded. The initial trial allowed the state to proceed, but all three of the main players involved, Priddy, Whitehead, and Strode, were aware that the case needed to proceed through the appeals process to determine the validity of the law under which the case was prosecuted. Albert Priddy died as the appeals process was being initiated. He was replaced in the suit by John H. Bell, the new superintendent of the Colony.
In the fall of 1925, the case was heard by the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Virginia, with arguments presented by Strode and Whitehead. In November the Court upheld the decision and ruled that forced sterilization was authorized under the law which it found to be in accordance with the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The only remaining potential obstacle was the Constitution of the United States and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court.