Paul

On the second of May 1927 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a twenty-year-old Virginia girl should be sterilised against her will on the grounds that she, her mother and her baby daughter were all feeble-minded, and four years later the baby daughter was on the honour roll at school. Carrie Buck had been taken from her mother at three and given to a foster family in Charlottesville, who kept her out of school from the sixth grade to do their housework. At seventeen she was raped by the family's nephew and fell pregnant, and the family, rather than have the thing spoken of, had her committed to the state colony for epileptics and the feeble-minded as incorrigible and promiscuous. Her mother was already in it. Carrie's baby, Vivian, was taken from her and given to the same foster family that had covered up the rape. The colony's superintendent had a new law he wanted tested, and Carrie was the test. Virginia's sterilisation statute needed a case to go all the way to the Supreme Court so that it could be copied by every other state, and the colony chose the quiet girl with the illegitimate child and the mother in the ward. It gave her a lawyer, who had sat on the colony's board and was a close friend of the superintendent, and who called no witnesses and put up no fight. A social worker testified that the baby, at seven months, had a look about her that was not quite normal. That was the evidence for the third generation. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the opinion for eight of the nine justices, and the sentence in it is the most notorious in the Court's history: three generations of imbeciles are enough. Carrie was sterilised at the colony that October. Over the following fifty years the number of Americans sterilised under laws her case had upheld climbed past sixty thousand, and Nazi defendants cited it in their own defence at Nuremberg. Vivian went to school in Charlottesville, was marked average or better, and made the honour roll in 1931. She died of an illness the next year, aged eight. Carrie was released, married twice, read the newspaper every day, and was traced in 1980 after she and her husband had been found malnourished in their home near Charlottesville, lucid and ordinary, and angry to the end. They done me wrong, she said. They done us all wrong. Her sister Doris had been sterilised at the same colony at sixteen and told it was an appendix operation, and had spent her marriage trying for children and wondering. Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. It is still cited. The father figure who should have protected her was a foster home that handed her to the state. The expert was a superintendent with a law to test. The daughter who was the proof of the family's defect brought home a report card, and it was good.