Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”Įugenicists believed that the human race must begin to take control not just of human reproduction, but of ethnic intermingling. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.
The court’s majority opinion was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes: “It is better for all the world,” Holmes wrote, “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. Bell became a test case brought before the Supreme Court, which voted 8–1 to make sterilization a constitutionally valid way for the state to prevent anyone deemed “unfit” from having children.
In Better for All the World, Harry Bruinius charts the little-known history of eugenics in America-a movement that began in the early twentieth century and resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 65,000 Americans.īruinius tells the stories of Emma and Carrie Buck, two women trapped in poverty and caught up in a new scientific quest for racial purity.
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