11/18/2023 0 Comments Could at least keep it a buck likeBy the time Buck’s pregnancy could no longer be hidden, Alice and her husband John had decided to institutionalize Carrie for being an unwed teenage mother. In the previous fall, Buck’s foster mother, Alice Dobbs, had noticed that her seventeen-year-old foster child was pregnant. Among the women approved for sterilization was Carrie Buck, who would become the first person sterilized under the Virginia Sterilization Act. The board approved the use of salpingectomy on fourteen of the women, and left decisions about the remaining four pending. In August, Priddy presented to the Virginia Colony’s Board a list of eighteen patients eligible for sterilization. The lawsuit would sue Priddy in an attempt to challenge the legality of the Sterilization Act. A patient would be selected for sterilization and Priddy would arrange for a lawsuit on the patient’s behalf to challenge the decision to sterilize him or her. Priddy would arrange a test case, to be appealed and taken to the Supreme Court, in order to test the constitutionality of the sterilization legislation. On Strode’s advice, Priddy sought to validate the Act by subjecting it to judicial review. It stated that in certain cases, inmates of any state institution could be sterilized if the institution's board found that the patient was idiotic, insane, feebleminded, epileptic, or an imbecile. On 20 March 1924, the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act was signed into law. Ultimately, Strode’s sterilization law relied on Laughlin’s Model Law. Though Priddy won the case, the experience taught him that future legislation should be carefully worded to ensure its constitutionality. In 1917, Priddy was sued for sterilizing Willie Mallory, on the grounds that Mallory was held and operated on against her will. In Virginia, Albert Priddy, superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded in Lynchburg, Virginia, recruited legislator Aubrey Strode in order to draft a state sterilization law. Laughlin’s Model Law claimed that, if enacted, the genes from “the most worthless one-tenth of our present population” would be eliminated within two generations. Laughlin’s book included a copy of his Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, which he designed to serve a prototype of constitutional state sterilization laws. Determined to craft legislation that could withstand judicial scrutiny, Harry Hamilton Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, published Eugenical Sterilization in the United States in 1922. Several more states attempted to pass sterilization laws, but one was overturned and state governors vetoed two more. Positive eugenics encouraged reproduction among individuals with hereditary advantages, whereas negative eugenics sought to prevent people deemed disabled or socially inferior from reproducing by restricting immigration, banning interracial marriages, and sterilization.īy 1914, twelve states had passed compulsory sterilization legislation, but these laws were often challenged and weakly enforced. The eugenics movement held that hereditary defects weaken society and should be eliminated from the population. Vasectomies could sever a man’s vasa deferentia, while salpingectomies could sever a woman’s Fallopian tubes, although surgical procedures posed their own problems. The US compulsory sterilization movement gained momentum in the 1890s, when eugenics became increasingly influential in politics and sterilization operations began to replace castration and other forms of mutilation. It also bolstered the American eugenics movement and established legal authority for sterilizing more than 60,000 US citizens in more than thirty states, until most of the practices ended in the 1970s. Bell determined that compulsory sterilization laws did not violate due process awarded by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. On, in an eight to one decision, the US Supreme Court ordered that Carrie Buck, whom it called a feebleminded daughter of a feebleminded mother and herself the mother of a feebleminded child, be sterilized under the 1924 Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act. The court argued that imbecility, epilepsy, and feeblemindedness are hereditary, and that inmates should be prevented from passing these defects to the next generation. Bell set a legal precedent that states may sterilize inmates of public institutions. In 1927, the US Supreme Court case Buck v.
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