Sterilized by the state.

• Author: Root, Damon W.
• Position: Soundbite - Carrie Buck case - Interview

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In his startling new book Three Generations, No Imbeciles (Johns Hopkins University Press), University of Georgia law professor Paul A. Lombardo looks at the Supreme Court's notorious 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, which upheld a Virginia law permitting the forced sterilization of the "feebleminded and socially inadequate."

At the center of the case was a young woman named Carrie Buck. She had been raped and impregnated by the nephew of her foster mother, then committed to a state institution by her foster parents, where she was sterilized. In his majority opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dismissed Buck, her mother, and her daughter as "mental defectives" and declared, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Associate Editor Damon Root spoke with Paul A. Lombardo in September.

Q: What happened to the girl at the center of the case?

A: Carrie Buck was a girl who was about 17 years old. When the story begins she finds herself pregnant without a husband. She gives birth in the same year that the Virginia legislature passed a law that calls for sterilization of people who are so-called socially inadequate, which includes people who are in institutions like the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and the Feeble-Minded. Carrie Buck gets sent to that colony, which is an asylum for people with various kinds of disabilities. She gets sent there because she is declared to be a moral defective.

Q: Her lawyer, Irving Whitehead, has a relationship with this institution, right?

A: One of the great ironies is that the building in which Carrie Buck is sterilized has a plaque on the front of it--it's still there--which has her lawyer's name on it as a member of the board of directors of the Colony in its earliest years. He advises and votes in favor of sterilization.

He essentially throws the case. He doesn't present any evidence on her behalf, no witnesses at all. In the book, I think I present good evidence that the fix was in. By any measure, whether it's today or the measure of 100 years ago, he stands out in terms of his...