Buck v. Bell

Buck v. Bell made simple.

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Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200 Decided: May 2, 1927

Buck v. Bell was a 1927 Supreme Court case that ruled a "Virginia statute which authorized sterilization" was totally constitutional.

Facts of the case

The case came about when Carrie Buck (1906–1983), a seventeen-year old girl who had recently become pregnant after being raped by the nephew of her foster parents, was sent to the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and ordered to be sterilized under a recently passed Virginia law, primarily on the basis that her biological mother had received a similar diagnosis several years beforehand, therefore giving the doctors the impression this was a hereditary trait. The specific term that was used to describe Bell's condition was "feeblemindedness," which "was a term that first emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in the United States to describe individuals exhibiting a lack of productivity or other behaviors viewed as 'backward.'" Essentially, Bell was picked because of "the belief that she had inherited her feeblemindedness from her mother and that her daughter showed signs of slow mental development as well."

The diagnosis of Buck's mother was "based less on a medical finding than on the doctors’ perception of her sexual behavior." Looking through Carrie's school records, "her records indicate normal progress each year." Similarly, Carrie's daughter Vivian, although by no means a genius, was believed by those observed her to be of perfectly average intelligence.

Buck's lawyer was also a man named Irving Whitehead, "whose weak defense of Carrie Buck almost assured that the law [which allowed Buck to be sterilized] would stand" according to one source. Whitehead "called no witnesses to challenge the charges made about Carrie’s mental health or to question the science behind the eugenical theory espoused by the so-called expert witnesses despite evidence and opportunities to do so." This is hardly surprising given that Whitehead was a fellow supporter of eugenics who "had served on the Board of Directors of the Virginia Colony and that Aubrey E. Strode, the author of the Virginia law, had previously acted as legal counsel to the Board." "Whitehead failed because he intended to fail", wrote one scholar.

Things get worse

The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which was packed with forces who were against Buck from the start. As one article puts it:

It would be hard to imagine a less sympathetic body. Chief Justice William Howard Taft had ties to the eugenics movement, and four of the associate justices constituted a reactionary clique later nicknamed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There is no formal portrait of the Supreme Court for the 1924 term because one of the members refused to sit next to Louis Brandeis, the court’s first Jewish member. Several years later, two of the justices would lobby against the nomination of Benjamin Cardozo so as not “to afflict the court with another Jew.”

Taft infamously wrote the foreword to the 1915 book How to Live: Rules For Healthful Living Based on Modern Science, written by Irving Fisher and Eugene Lyman Fisk, which declared that "As the science of eugenics gather as greater wealth of evidence and subjects it to vigorous analysis, its ability to guide the race to higher levels will become more positive and far-reaching."

Oliver Wendell Holmes similarly had a reputation for supporting eugenics that went back "long before the Buck v. Bell case came to the Supreme Court." Holmes was also the author of the majority opinion, which agreed with the notion that Carrie Buck, her mother, and her daughter, were what the doctors described them as, causing him to conclude that "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This was after he declared "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."