Buck v. Bell and compulsory sterilization

Carrie Buck was 17 and pregnant in January 1924, by her own account after being raped by a nephew of the couple who had raised her since she was three. That couple, John and Alice Dobbs, petitioned a Charlottesville court to have her committed. Her daughter, Vivian, was born on 28 March, and on 4 June Carrie arrived at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, near Lynchburg, where her mother, Emma Buck, had been held since 1920.

On 20 March 1924 Virginia had approved a law allowing superintendents of state institutions to have patients whose mental conditions were judged hereditary sterilized, by vasectomy in men and salpingectomy in women. Each case required notice, a hearing before the institution's board and a right of appeal. The colony's superintendent, Albert Priddy, wanted the law tested in court, and Carrie Buck became the test case. Aubrey Strode, who had drafted the law, represented the colony. Irving Whitehead, a former member of the colony's board and a supporter of sterilization, represented Buck. Priddy died in January 1925, and his successor, John H. Bell, became the named party.

At the first hearing, in the Amherst County Circuit Court in November 1924, a social worker testified that the baby did not look quite normal. The court upheld the sterilization order in February 1925, and the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia affirmed it that November. The US Supreme Court decided the case on 2 May 1927, by 8 votes to 1. Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. reasoned that the principle behind compulsory vaccination was broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes, and wrote, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Justice Pierce Butler dissented without a written opinion.

Bell sterilized Carrie Buck on 19 October 1927. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, 8,515 Americans had been sterilized from 1907 to 1927; almost 28,000 were sterilized in the next ten years, and about 8,300 Virginians between 1927 and 1972. Vivian made the honor roll at Venable Elementary School in 1931 and died at the age of eight. Carrie married twice and died in 1983.

Several Nazi defendants at Nuremberg cited the decision in their defense. In Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) the Supreme Court outlawed sterilization as a punishment, but it has never overturned Buck v. Bell. On 2 May 2002, the 75th anniversary of the ruling, Governor Mark Warner apologized for the state's part in the eugenics movement.