Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell - Couverture rigide

Lombardo, Paul A.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0801890101 ISBN 13 : 9780801890109

Editeur : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009

Synopsis

"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy. Paul Lombardo's startling narrative exposes the Buck case's fraudulent roots. In 1924 Carrie Buck-involuntarily institutionalized by the State of Virginia after she was raped and impregnated-challenged the state's plan to sterilize her. Having already judged her mother and daughter mentally deficient, Virginia wanted to make Buck the first person sterilized under a new law designed to prevent hereditarily "defective" people from reproducing. Lombardo's more than twenty-five years of research and his own interview with Buck before she died demonstrate conclusively that she was destined to lose the case before it had even begun. Neither Carrie Buck nor her mother and daughter were the "imbeciles" condemned in the Holmes opinion. Her lawyer-a founder of the institution where she was held-never challenged Virginia's arguments and called no witnesses on Buck's behalf. And judges who heard her case, from state courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court, sympathized with the eugenics movement. Virginia had Carrie Buck sterilized shortly after the 1927 decision. Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned. Three Generations, No Imbeciles tracks the notorious case through its history, revealing that it remains a potent symbol of government control of reproduction and a troubling precedent for the human genome era.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Paul A. Lombardo (ATLANTA, GA) is a Regents' Professor and the Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law at Georgia State University. The author of A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, he has played a key role, as both a historian and a lawyer, in the movement to solicit state apologies and legislative denunciations of past eugenics laws.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0801890101
• ISBN 13: 9780801890109
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 384
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible