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 Lombardos startling narrative exposes the Buck cases fraudulent roots.
In 1924 Carrie Buckinvoluntarily institutionalized by the State of Virginia after she was raped and impregnatedchallenged the states 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. Lombardos 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 lawyera founder of the institution where she was heldnever challenged Virginias arguments and called no witnesses on Bucks 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.
Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at 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 control of reproduction and a troubling precedent for the human genome era.
