Carrie Buck's Daughter (excerpt)
by Stephen Jay Gould
estrictions upon
immigration, with natural quotas set to discriminate against those deemed mentally unfit
by early versions of IQ testing, marked the greatest triumph of the American eugenics
movement—the flawed hereditarian doctrine, so popular earlier in our century and by
no means extinct today, that attempted to "improve" our human stock by preventing the
propagation of those deemed biologically unfit and encouraging procreation among the
supposedly worthy. But the movement to enact and enforce laws for compulsory "eugenic"
sterilization had an impact and success scarcely less pronounced. If we could debar the
shiftless and the stupid from our shores, we might also prevent the propagation of those
similarly affected but already here.
The movement for compulsory sterilization began in earnest during the
1890s, abetted by two major factors—the rise of eugenics as an influential political
movement and the perfection of safe and simple operations (vasectomy for men and
salpingectomy, the cutting and tying of Fallopian tubes, for women) to replace castration
and other socially unacceptable forms of mutilation. Indiana passed the first sterilization
act based on eugenic principles in 1907 (a few states had previously mandated castration as
a punitive measure for certain sexual crimes, although such laws were rarely enforced and
usually overturned by judicial review). Like so many others to follow, it provided for
sterilization of afflicted people residing in the state's "care," either as inmates of
mental hospitals and homes for the feeble-minded or as inhabitants of prisons.
Sterilization could be imposed upon those judged insane, idiotic, imbecilic, or moronic,
and upon convicted rapists or criminals when recommended by a board of experts.
By the 1930s, more than thirty states had pass similar laws, often with
an expanded list of so-called hereditary defects, including alcoholism and drug addiction,
and even blindness and deafness in others. These laws were continually challenged and
rarely enforced in most states; only California and Virginia applied them zealously. By
January 1935, some 20,000 forced "eugenic" sterilizations had been performed in the United
States nearly half in California.
No organization crusaded more vociferously and successfully for these
laws than the Eugenics Record Office, a semiofficial arm and repository of data for the
eugenics movement in America. Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office,
dedicated most of his career to a tireless campaign of writing and lobbying for eugenics
sterilization. [...]
The campaign for forced eugenics sterilization in America reached its
climax and height of respectability in 1927, when the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 vote, upheld
the Virginia sterilization bill in Buck v. Bell. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then
in his mid-eighties and the most celebrated jurist in America, wrote the majority opinion
with his customary verve and power of style. It included the notorious paragraph, with
its chilling tag line, cited ever since as the quintessential statement of eugenic
principles. Remembering with pride his own distinct experiences as an infantryman in the
Civil War, Holmes wrote:
"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may
call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call
upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices. . . .
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 principle that stains compulsory
vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of
imbeciles are enough." [...]
And so Buck v. Bell remained for fifty years, a footnote
to a moment of American history perhaps best forgotten. Then, in 1980, it reemerged to
prick our collective conscience, when Dr. K. Ray Nielsen, then director of the Lynchburg
hospital where Carrie Buck had been sterilized, researched the records of his institution
and discovered that more than 4,000 sterilizations had been performed, the last as late
as 1972. He also found Carrie Buck, alive and well near Charlottesville, and her sister
Doris, covertly sterilized by the same law (she was told that her operation was for
appendicitis), and now, with fierce dignity, dejected and bitter because she had wanted
a child more than anything else in her life and had finally, in her old age, learned why
she had never conceived. [Full Text]
[ Stephen Jay Gould, "Carrie Buck's Daughter" Natural History 93
(July): 14-18; Reprinted here, with permission, from
The Flamingo's Smile,
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985, pp. 307-313. ]
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