Forced Sterilization: America’s Eugenics Campaign

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that states could legally sterilize people deemed “unfit” to reproduce, and by 1970 an estimated 65,000 Americans had been forcibly sterilized under state eugenics laws. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority in Buck v. Bell, upheld Virginia’s Eugenic Sterilization Act and delivered one of the most infamous lines in Supreme Court history: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The case involved Carrie Buck, a 21-year-old woman committed to the Virginia State Colony following a rape — the assault, by the nephew of her foster family, had resulted in a pregnancy. Carrie Buck was not intellectually disabled. The science underlying her sterilization was false. The Supreme Court decision has never been formally overturned.^1^

Eugenics Was Mainstream Science, Not Fringe Pseudoscience

Eugenics — the pseudoscientific program of “improving” the human population by controlling reproduction — was not a fringe movement in early 20th-century America. It was mainstream science, taught at major universities, funded by established philanthropies including the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, and embraced by a wide range of progressive intellectuals who believed that poverty, crime, intellectual disability, and moral failing were hereditary traits that could be bred out of the population.^1^

The scientific claims underlying eugenics were wrong. The traits eugenicists sought to eliminate — poverty, “feeblemindedness,” criminality, “promiscuity” — are not single-gene hereditary conditions. Intelligence and behavior are shaped by genetics, environment, nutrition, education, and economic circumstance in ways that eugenicists did not understand and deliberately oversimplified. The field’s foundational data, much of it generated by the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, under the direction of Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, was fabricated, cherry-picked, or based on grossly inadequate methodology.

But the policy consequences of these false scientific claims were real and enduring. By 1927, 23 states had passed forced sterilization statutes. Indiana’s law, the first, had been passed in 1907. California’s program, the most aggressive, sterilized more than 20,000 people before it was finally ended in 1979.

The Poor, the Institutionalized, and Women of Color Were the Primary Targets

Eugenic sterilization in practice fell overwhelmingly on people who were poor, institutionalized, or from minority groups. The category of “feebleminded” — the primary target of most state sterilization laws — was elastic enough to encompass virtually anyone deemed socially deviant. Women who had children outside of marriage, people with epilepsy, immigrants who performed poorly on English-language IQ tests, and people who were simply poor were all labeled “feebleminded” and institutionalized in facilities where sterilization was available.^2^

In North Carolina, which had one of the most aggressive postwar eugenics programs in the country, the Eugenics Board sterilized approximately 7,600 people between 1929 and 1974. Beginning in the 1940s, the program increasingly targeted Black women — by the 1960s, Black North Carolinians, who made up about 25 percent of the state’s population, represented more than 65 percent of those sterilized by the Eugenics Board. County welfare workers routinely threatened to cut off benefits to families unless mothers agreed to sterilization.^3^

In California’s institutions, records show systematic sterilization of Mexican American women and women of color. A 2020 investigation by the California state legislature found that at least 1,400 women were sterilized in California prisons between 1997 and 2013 — in violation of state law, with coercion documented in inmate accounts, by physicians who told women that sterilization would reduce the burden of children on the state.

What the Carrie Buck Case Was Actually Designed to Do

The Buck v. Bell case has been examined in detail by historians who have established that Carrie Buck was not intellectually disabled and that the case against her was constructed to test Virginia’s new sterilization law. Her court-appointed lawyer, Irving Whitehead, was a former board member of the institution seeking to sterilize her and made no real effort to challenge the evidence against her. The “expert witnesses” who testified to her and her mother’s “hereditary feeblemindedness” drew their conclusions from brief observations and social prejudice.^4^

Carrie Buck was sterilized on October 19, 1927. Her daughter Vivian, whom the eugenicists had also labeled feebleminded, attended first grade at a Charlottesville public school, where her teacher remembered her as bright and capable. Vivian Buck died of enteric fever in 1932 at age eight.

Carrie Buck herself lived until 1983. She spent decades doing domestic work and farm labor, read the newspaper daily, and was assessed by multiple researchers who interviewed her as a woman of normal intelligence. The Supreme Court decision that made her sterilization legal — Buck v. Bell — was cited approvingly as recently as 1942 in Skinner v. Oklahoma, and has never been formally reversed.

Nazi Germany Learned This From American Law

The connection between American eugenics programs and Nazi Germany’s racial hygiene program is direct and documented. Nazi racial scientists cited American state sterilization laws and American eugenicists’ work extensively in their own publications during the 1930s. Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office received an honorary degree from Heidelberg University in 1936 in recognition of his contribution to racial science.^5^

The Nuremberg Doctors’ Tribunal, which prosecuted Nazi physicians for wartime human experimentation and forced sterilization in 1946 and 1947, prompted some American eugenicists to distance themselves from the Nazi program — but the American state sterilization laws remained on the books. Virginia’s statute was not repealed until 1974. Twenty-eight states still had eugenics laws on the books as late as 1956, and California’s program operated until 1979.

North Carolina became the first state to issue a formal apology to sterilization victims, in 2003. In 2013, the state established a reparations process that provided $20,000 to living victims who could document their sterilization. Of an estimated 7,600 people sterilized in North Carolina, roughly 220 were still alive when the program was established. The government that forcibly sterilized 65,000 people over seven decades has paid compensation to a fraction of them, and the Supreme Court decision that authorized the whole program has never been struck down. The same pattern of government programs targeting vulnerable populations without accountability also defines the Tuskegee study and the Cold War radiation experiments.

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Sources:

1. Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
2. Black, Edwin. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003.
3. Schoen, Johanna. Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare. University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
4. Lombardo, Paul A. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
5. Kühl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Oxford University Press, 1994.