The Supreme Court rules on the Carrie Buck case
After hearing arguments the Supreme Court of the United States issued an 8-1 decision which found the Virginia Sterilization Act in no way violated the laws of the United States. In reaching its decision the court considered a law, previously ruled as constitutional, in Massachusetts which made vaccination mandatory before enrolling in state schools. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in April, 1927 and released its decision the following month. In it, the Court held that enforced sterilization was an obligation of the state to protect its citizens.
The Court’s decision was presented by Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the decision, Justice Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” Thus the Virginia statute calling for sterilization of those it deemed feebleminded was found to be in accordance with the law of the land.
The decision was rendered in May, 1927. That October Carrie Buck was sterilized at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, the first person to be so treated under the law. The operation was performed by Dr. John H. Bell, the Colony’s superintendent. In 1931 Carrie’s daughter Vivian, designated as feebleminded by so-called expert witnesses during the suit to have her mother sterilized was placed on the academic honor roll at Venable Public Elementary School in Charlottesville, Virginia. The following year Vivian died of a digestive ailment.
Carrie was released following her sterilization and in 1932 married a carpenter and widower named William Eagle. They remained married until his death in the spring of 1941. In 1965 she married again, to Charles Detamore of Front Royal, Virginia. Carrie continued to reside in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia until her death in 1983. She was buried in Charlottesville. She lived long enough to see Virginia officially repeal its law which not only allowed, but encouraged state enforced sterilization of people deemed by the state to be unfit to reproduce.
The finding by the United States Supreme Court, with its wording which can only be described as wretched, has never been overturned. Instead, its wording and its overall opinion were cited by members of the German Nazi party as partial justification for its own eugenics program, and American eugenicists across the nation used it to develop similar programs in their own states. Eventually, 32 of the then 48 American states passed eugenics laws, with forced sterilization of undesirables. California became the nation’s leader in involuntary sterilization, eventually performing nearly 20,000 operations.