On Tuesday, a task force in North Carolina concluded that it would request restitution of $50,000 from the North Carolina legislature to each of the estimated 1,500-2,000 living victims of the state's formal 45-year experiment with eugenics. As recently as 1974, people deemed "undesirable" by North Carolina authorities (most often minorities, women, the mentally ill, and the impoverished) were subjected to involuntary sterilization.
This is unfortunately just the last page of one chapter in the history of America's experimenting with the practice of eugenics. Much like the fact that almost 150 years after the ratification of the 13th Amendment the United States still struggles to annihilate human trafficking and slavery within its borders, most Americans are unaware of the history of eugenics and forced sterilization in the United States.
The practice also has a rather dark history with the U.S. Supreme Court, which, when given the opportunity, granted the practice purported constitutionality. In what was almost certainly the worst opinion of his career (and ranking as one of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court, along with the Dred Scott case and Plessy v. Ferguson) Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr. declared that "three generations of imbeciles is enough," upholding the constitutionality of the sterilization of Carrie Buck, a Virginia woman who had been institutionalized as "feeble minded," in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). Later scholarship indicates that Carrie had likely been raped by a successful doctor who employed her as his housekeeper and insisted on her being committed to protect himself, was institutionalized by her ne'er do well mother, and received ineffective assistance of counsel at trial from an attorney who had inexcusable conflicts of interest and who may have deliberately lost the case. Nonetheless, Carrie Buck lost her petition before the US Supreme Court in an eight-to-one decision and was sterilized against her will upon her return to Virginia. Her daughter, Emma, whom Holmes regarded as the third generation of imbeciles, was perfectly normal and did well in school. The eugenics expert that recommended Carrie's sterilization went on to be honored by the Nazis for drafting Germany's "Race Hygiene" law, the direct legal progenitor of the Holocaust.
Following Buck v. Bell, eugenic sterilization laws were passed by an increasing number of states, and by 1956 27 states had sterilization laws on the books. Even after Skinner v. State of Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942) prevented the application of compulsory sterilization to convicted criminals under a statute that excluded white-collar crimes on equal protection grounds, the practice continued. Eugenics fell out of favor in the U.S. after the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the Holocaust and subsequent defenses raised by war criminals at Nuremburg, some of which cited American eugenics practices as evidence of the permissibility of genocide, but the statutes remained on the books across the country. In North Carolina, the practice continued until 1974. Oregon maintained a Board of Social Protection (f/k/a the Oregon Board of Eugenics) until 1983.
Here's the kicker--under existing American constitutional law, forced sterilization is technically constitutional. The most recent case, Poe v. Lynchburg Training School & Hospital, 518 F. Supp 789 (W.D. Va 1981), found that sterilization did not violate constitutional rights. At least as a technical matter, the law of the land still tolerates the involuntary sterilization of some of the most helpless among us.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.