The story of an 18-year-old unwed mother from Charlottesville, one of the thousands of Virginians to be involuntarily sterilized, is about to come to Virginia's attention.
Last Wednesday, the Department of Historic Resources approved a highway marker remembering the 1927 Supreme Court case that upheld Virginia's state law legalizing sterilization.
The marker will memorialize the Buck v. Bell Case, as well as Charlottesville native Carrie Buck, who was the first person sterilized under the law. It will be placed on the property of a Region Ten Community Services Board located on Preston Avenue. The exact location will be determined by the Virginia Department of Transportation.
"Virginia's highway marker program has been providing history lessons to the traveling public along Virginia's scenic roadways," Secretary of Natural Resources W. Tayloe Murphy Jr. said.
Paul A. Lombardo, director of the University's program in law and medicine at the center for biomedical ethics, aided Murphy in the project and is the marker's sponsor.
Lombardo will give a lecture entitled "Eugenics in Virginia: from Charlottesville to the Supreme Court," tonight in Clark 147.
Eugenics testing, now known for its fraudulence and prejudice, once was considered the chief scientific method for evaluating people's intelligence. In 1924, the state passed a law that permitted involuntary sterilization for those considered "feeble-minded."
That same year, Buck, an 18-year-old rape victim in Charlottesville became pregnant and was committed involuntarily to a state facility near Lynchburg.
Buck, like most of the 8,300 Virginians sterilized since 1924, was a lower class worker who garnered suspicion for a "feeble mind and social inadequacy," Lombardo said.
"Since so-called problems like hers were considered hereditary, there was a fear that her progeny would be peculiar or abnormal," Lombardo added.
When Buck was recommended for sterilization, the Circuit Court in Virginia agreed, and Buck's lawyer appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 1927 case of Buck v. Bell was passed by a vote of eight to one, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes presiding.
Holmes, accepting the eugenical arguments regarding genetic inferiority, stated "three generations of imbeciles are enough."
About 60,000 Americans have been sterilized, Lombardo said.
Buck died in 1983. Subsequent research has shown that Buck had no hereditary defects.
In addition, the House of Delegates passed a resolution two months ago to have the General Assembly honor the memory of Buck on May 2, which marks the 75th anniversary of Buck v. Bell.
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