The Supreme Court Voted 8 to 1 to Force-Sterilize Carrie Buck — and the Decision Has Never Been Overruled

Carrie Buck was 18 in 1927 — pregnant, in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, having been institutionalized after her adoptive family's nephew raped her and the resulting pregnancy had scandalized them. The Colony's superintendent, Albert Priddy, had been quietly sterilizing inmates and wanted a court ruling that explicitly authorized it. He picked Buck as the test case. Her mother had also been institutionalized; her infant daughter, Vivian, was claimed to be "defective." The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the law. Buck v. Bell reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927.

The court ruled 8–1 in favor of Virginia on May 2, 1927. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the majority opinion. The reasoning leaned hard on then-fashionable eugenics: "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 opinion ended with the line that Holmes seems to have considered a rhetorical flourish and that history has remembered as the worst sentence he ever wrote: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Justice Pierce Butler dissented without writing.

Carrie Buck was sterilized on October 19, 1927. Her daughter Vivian, the alleged third "imbecile" generation, made the school honor roll in 1931 with A's and B's; she died of measles complications at eight. The decision was never formally overruled. Within a decade, more than two dozen U.S. states had similar compulsory sterilization laws on the books. The Nazi 1933 Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses directly cited Buck v. Bell as precedent. By the time most state laws were repealed in the 1970s, the United States had performed an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 forced sterilizations.