Eugenics Sterilisation Movement

The word “eugenics” carries a notorious meaning and a dark history. It’s the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable traits. Eugenics also advocates to “reduce” human suffering by breeding out and weeding off disabilities and other undesirable characteristics from the human population.

The birth of eugenics can be traced back to the 20th century when Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” and imbibed it as a moral philosophy to improve humanity by encouraging the ablest and healthiest lot to have more kids. But that was positive eugenics. The eugenics movement that took hold in the US, Germany and Scandinavia had a more negative approach. They advocated culling the least able from the human population.

The rallying point of eugenicists was to prevent the “defectives” from breeding through compulsory sterilization. This was most often perceived as the more “humane way” of dealing with undesirable traits. Doctors who performed these sterilization procedures preferred vasectomy and tube ligations. Sterilization, according to them, was not a punishment but a method to treat unfit people with irreversibly degenerate germplasm. The sterilization approach for men and women were quite distinct from one another. Men were treated to their aggression and criminal behaviour. But in the case of women, the eugenicists held them more accountable than men for reproducing “less desirable” members of society. So women were treated to “protect” society and “weed” out the defectives.

One of the most significant cases from the eugenics cases was the 1927 Buck vs Bell case at the U.S Supreme Court. Carrie Buck from Virginia was a young girl who was pregnant and unmarried at the age of 17. Her mother, Emma Buck, was an inmate at the Lynchburg Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Emma realized Carrie was in a foster home when she realised that she wouldn’t support the child herself after her separation from her husband. Carrie lived with the Dobbs family, attended school, helped in chores, sang in the church choir and lived a relatively normal life. In the summer of 1923, when Carrie had almost reached sweet sixteen, she was raped by a nephew of Mrs Dobbs. When the Dobbs family found out that Carrie had become pregnant, they brought her to the Lynchburg Colony and reported that she was “feebleminded” and “peculiar” since birth. On March 28, 1924, Carrie gave birth to Vivian.

All these incidents, unfortunately, coincided with the involuntary sterilization law that was passed in Virginia. The officials at the Colony decided to take up her case for sterilisation. The Buck vs Bell case was first heard in Amherst County, and the lawyer presented the court with some strange evidence. They claimed that Carrie was mentally defective, socially and economically inadequate to sustain herself, carries a record of immorality, prostitution and now an illegitimate child. They also included that she comes from a worthless and backward class of people and how it warrants the hereditary nature of “feeblemindedness”. The judge ruled against Carrie and decided that Carrie, her mother Emma, and her daughter Vivian were all “socially inadequate”.

In the April of 1927, the case had made its way to the U.S Supreme Court, and the judge ruled that “ 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 a crime... Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind”.

Following the ruling, Carrie was sterilised in October 1927. She continued to live normally, and the people who knew her remarked on her kindness and her voracious reading interests; quite strange they hadn’t noticed her “feeblemindedness”.

In 1928, Carrie’s sister was also sterilised without her information. She had been told that it was an operation to remove her appendix. Only years later, in 1980, that she came to know why she couldn’t conceive.

The case of Buck v. Bell was a pivotal one in the history of the eugenic sterilisation movement. After the case’s ruling, dozens of states updated the sterilisation laws in the book and made it a more common procedure.

At its very core, the American eugenics movement revealed their ulterior motives to remove those who were not white, upper class or wealthy. And the eugenics as a whole leaves us with a chilling lesson of how sloppy reading of genetic textbooks stole the lives and wombs of thousands.