Reproductive Wrongs

Most historical highway markers slide into the ground without ceremony. The governor does not issue formal apologies in connection with their dedications. Crowds do not gather ‘round. University professors do not make impassioned speeches. The national media do not cover the installation.

Then again, most highway markers do not tell the story of Carrie Buck, who was ordered sterilized by government officials in her home state of Virginia, setting off a nationwide campaign to prevent “undesirable” people from reproducing.

In Buck’s case, you could argue that all the fuss and the speeches and the brand-new apology were long overdue. And nowhere near enough. The small marker was placed in Virginia. But there are 32 other states--including California--where state officials would do well to acknowledge, for the same reasons Gov. Mark Warner did, that “We must remember ... past mistakes in order to prevent them from recurring.”

These were no small mistakes. They include an infamous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, Buck vs. Bell. The ceremony earlier this month was timed to the 75th anniversary of that May 2, 1927, decision. There’s scientific arrogance in this story, as well as abuse of governmental power on a breathtaking scale.

But let us begin small. Let us begin with little Carrie Buck, described by those who knew her as shy and sweet and eager to please, and by our highest court as a second-generation imbecile.

She was born in Charlottesville, Va., in 1906, the out-of-wedlock daughter of a welfare mother. She had big, dark eyes, a round, serious face, always neat clothes. As a teenager, she was placed with a foster family and raped by a member of that family. The rape resulted in a pregnancy. At age 17, she had a baby daughter she named Vivian, who was herself placed with a foster family.

At this point, as if things weren’t bad enough, Buck caught the attention of people in power in Virginia.

The eugenics movement was at its strongest then. The theories of eugenics are loosely grounded in genetics, in the idea that we are determined by our genes and that some of us (read: those in power) have better genes than others do. Therefore, eugenicists concluded, our leaders should improve society by removing substandard humans from the gene pool. The movement’s list of defective humans included beggars, tramps, alcoholics, prostitutes, the shiftless, criminals, the physically deformed, the blind and deaf, and epileptics. It also included anyone they considered stupid. You could get on the “stupid” list by being, say, black or an American Indian. Or in Buck’s case, being what Virginia authorities called poor white trash.

The state drafted a compulsory sterilization law for such lowlifes. The only hitch was that state courts had not been sympathetic to such laws. So eugenicists wanted to trump the lower courts. The timing was perfect for a national validation. Oliver Wendell Holmes was chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And, as University of Chicago law professor Albert Alschuler points out, there was no more ardent eugenicist to be found. Holmes’ correspondence includes suggestions that low-IQ babies simply be killed.

Virginia authorities decided that Buck could be set up as a challenger to the sterilization law. They ran her and her mother through IQ tests and--surprise!--both failed. (Years later, Buck was retested by more objective testers and scored well within the range of average intelligence.) They recruited eugenicists from New York to testify that Buck’s child was subnormal as well, although the girl later became an honors student in elementary school. Then, once they had the “evidence” that she needed to be sterilized, they put her name on a lawsuit against the state, designating her the official challenger to the sterilization law.

And so Buck vs. Bell went straight from the state of Virginia into the waiting arms of the U.S. Supreme Court. The court declared that the government had the absolute power to regulate reproduction: “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes,” wrote Holmes in his majority opinion. He then explained further: “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.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has never reversed the ruling. It still is cited occasionally as a precedent in the government’s power over reproductive rights. Buck was the first person sterilized under the state law. Approximately 8,000 others, both male and female, would follow in Virginia. Nationwide, officials ordered some 60,000 compulsory sterilizations, continuing into the late 1970s. Some 20,000 of those were in California. The “model” laws of the United States were adopted, with open admiration, by the Nazi government of Germany, which ordered hundreds of thousands of operations.

Buck died alone, still poor, in 1983. Her bright little daughter died of an infection at age 8. Buck tried for years to have another child; the state authorities had not explained her operation any more than they had clarified her role in their self-serving lawsuit. “I don’t think she ever fully understood what had happened to her,” says University of Virginia law professor and bioethicist Paul Lombardo. “But there’s no doubt that she got the shame.” When Virginia journalists talked to her, not too long before her death, Buck (then with the married name of Detamore) was terrified of making state authorities angry. “I’m not going to get in trouble, am I?” was her first question. She wasn’t angry, she said. She didn’t believe in holding grudges. She thought politeness and kindness were the best way to get through life.

To her credit--and ours--she has had some excellent champions in recent years. Lombardo, an expert in the history of eugenics, has been standing up for Buck for almost two decades. It’s due to him that the marker says explicitly that “evidence eventually showed that Buck and many others had no ‘hereditary defects.’” Bioethicists around the country have railed against eugenics. The Richmond Times-Dispatch published a powerful investigation of Virginia’s eugenics record more than two years ago. In response, the state General Assembly passed a resolution of “profound regret.” During the recent gubernatorial election, all candidates promised to apologize--thus Gov. Warner’s May 2 repudiation of Virginia’s past.

Buck herself would undoubtedly have traded her place in history for a home with children, the one she might have had without so much official attention. Her life could be seen as a testament to the blessings of anonymity--that is, if we decided to advocate hiding as a way of life. Instead, fortunately, we assume in this country that all of us have the right to step out into the light, to have our chance at the ordinary pleasures of family and friends.

Buck’s story reminds us in the most direct way what can happen when our leaders assume that these basic rights and pleasures belong only to most of us, when they take what Lombardo calls a “governmental position of contempt for people who are poor or uneducated or disabled.” University of Wisconsin-Madison bioethicist Daniel Wikler sums it up like this: “In each case, the victims were those who were stigmatized and disvalued and who could not fight back.” He argues that the moral is not specific to eugenics or genetics: “The lesson of Buck vs. Bell, it seems to me, is that human rights are for everyone.”

So let us hope that the apologetic pomp and circumstance of the Virginia ceremony earlier this month foretells a trend in publicly rejecting Buck vs. Bell. There could even be a few more markers. We could use one in California, which, after all, had more than its share of Carrie Bucks. In this case, redundancy is a virtue. We cannot prove too many times that we really do learn from past mistakes.