Center for Law, Health & Society | News and Events | Center News | 2008 Archive | Supreme Court case allowing sterilizations a fraud, law professor writes in new book Supreme Court case allowing sterilizations a fraud, law professor writes in new book
October 15, 2008
A notorious U.S. Supreme Court decision that led to more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations of people described as "feebleminded and socially inadequate" was a fraud, says a new book by a Georgia State University law professor. The book documents how the case was initiated to hide the shame of a poor Virginia girl named Carrie Buck, pregnant after she had been raped.
In Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell (Johns Hopkins University Press), author Paul A. Lombardo provides the only fully documented account ever written of the 1927 Buck case. Buck was the only time in Supreme Court history that an intrusive medical procedure-involuntary sterilization-was endorsed as a tool of government eugenic policy. It is doubly infamous for the court's opinion, written by renowned Justice Oliver Wendell Jr. Holmes' declaration that "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" led to lifelong infamy for Carrie Buck and her family.
Lombardo was the last person to interview Carrie Buck before she died, and the book incorporates material he discovered over more than twenty-five years of research. Items such as Carrie Buck's medical records, the honor roll grade book of her daughter, Vivian, private correspondence of the lawyer who was named to represent her, and the only existing photos of all three generations of the Buck family support the conclusion that the Buck case was a fraud.
Although the Buck decision set the stage for several hundred thousand operations in the United States and other countries, and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. This book tracks the career of Buck in American memory, as a potent symbol of government control of reproduction and a troubling precedent in the human genome era.
In his book, Lombardo argues that the sham defense presented by Carrie Buck's lawyer doomed his client from the outset. "For many years he sat on the board of directors at the institution where Buck was being held. He was a strong advocate for the sterilization of inmates during that period. He had no intention of defending her-he threw the case" Lombardo said.
Although seven state legislatures have rejected past laws and repudiated eugenic policies in recent years, the idea of preventing certain people from having children hasn't gone away. In September, Louisiana State Rep. John LaBruzzo (R-Metarie) said he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied.
"His argument echoes comments straight from the eugenics era," Lombardo said. "Hard times are coming, the politician says, and we need to cut costs. Just sterilize the poor, the disabled and criminals and it will keep our taxes low."
Lombardo has played a key role, both as an historian and a lawyer, in advocating for legislative denunciations of past eugenics laws. In 1980, however, he had only as passing acquaintance with the U.S. eugenics movement when a headline in a Charlottesville, Virginia newspaper grabbed his attention. The headline read "‘I Wanted Babies Bad'-Woman Told of Her Sterilization," and the article described a lawsuit that had been filed to overturn the Buck case.
It was the start of a quarter-century of research for Lombardo. He dug through case records and the papers of the lawyer who orchestrated it, eventually finding Carrie Buck and talking with her in the last weeks of her life, then attending her funeral. He found Buck's school report cards and her daughter's honor roll record, which contradicted the Holmes comment. While studying the papers of a former eugenics expert, Lombardo discovered how the man had manufactured evidence to make the state's case against Carrie Buck. Other records confirmed the case was not just a tragedy, but also a legal sham.