Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck.

• Author: Kapp, Marshall B.
• Position: Book review

Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck

by Adam Cohen

To protect the general health, safety, welfare, and morals of the community from a serious public health threat (such as the Zika virus that currently threatens Florida residents), it is permissible and perhaps even necessary for state government to intervene under the authority of the inherent police power that is reserved to the states by the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Additionally, sometimes it is legitimate or even essential for states to act under their parens patriae power to protect people who cannot protect themselves against foreseeable dangers, for instance, when states require school children to be vaccinated against certain infectious diseases.

However, these powers can be overused and abused, often under the banner of progressivism and reform of society through social planning. Imbeciles explores one notorious historical example of such high-intentioned abuse pushed forward by the intellectual, social, and political elites of the day, namely the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that sought to perfect the American populace by getting rid of its genetically "defective" members. A key strategy within the eugenics paradigm of the time was the enactment of state statutes permitting the forced surgical sterilization of individuals deemed to be "feeble-minded." One victim of this legislative strategy to improve upon nature was Carrie Buck, an allegedly (but not actually) feeble-minded woman used by proponents of Virginia's statute to contrive a test case before the U.S. Supreme Court that resulted in Justice Holmes' infamous upholding of the enactment under the rationale that "[t]hree generations of imbeciles are enough." Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).

Organizing his exposition of the issues around the roles of several key...