Judgment on Eugenics Law

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Introduction

For about 30 years, from around 1900 to the late 1920s, America had an active and popular eugenics movement. Supporters of eugenics argued the public good required removing from the population genes thought to cause low intelligence, or immoral, criminal or anti-social behavior. Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, states passed laws requiring medical exams before issuing marriage licenses to make sure the unfit did not reproduce. (See the New York Times article “Pastors for Eugenics” for an effort to support such laws.) Indiana passed the first compulsory sterilization law in 1907, although other states had tried and failed before. Prominent Americans – among them Theodore Roosevelt, Stanford University President David Starr Jordan, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Margaret Sanger – supported the eugenics movement, as did such organizations as the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and various religious organizations. State Fairs included Better Baby contests. As the list of its supporters indicates, eugenics was considered a progressive reform, related to the larger Progressive movement by its emphasis on the good of society and the use of science and rationality to achieve it.

Eugenics always had its critics. A referendum authorizing sterilization failed in Oregon in 1913. Some governors refused to sign eugenic legislation. Nebraska’s governor vetoed a eugenics bill in 1913, writing that the legislation was “only an experiment and it seems more in keeping with the pagan age than with the teachings of Christianity. Man is more than an animal.” Not every state legislature passed such legislation. Federal and state courts regularly found forced sterilization laws unconstitutional because they were cruel and unusual punishments or because the application of the laws denied equal treatment. In addition to more conservative Protestants, Catholics and their clergy largely opposed eugenics.

Despite the opposition it faced, eugenic sterilization remained alive in part because of the Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell, which found constitutional the sterilization of Carrie Buck by the State of Virginia. From the beginning, Buck’s sterilization was intended to be a test case. Supporters of eugenics and sterilization hoped the case would reach the Supreme Court and that the Court would find sterilization constitutional. This would at once supersede all the rulings of state courts against sterilization. Buck’s guardian, appointed by those intending to sterilize her, took her case to Virginia state courts and eventually the Supreme Court. (The lower Virginia court found no grounds to block the sterilization.) The Supreme Court decided that nothing in the U.S. Constitution prevented Virginia from sterilizing Buck. Eight of nine justices joined in the decision, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, perhaps the preeminent jurist of the time. Holmes’ decision contained the now infamous remark, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The only dissent in the case came from Associate Justice Pierce Butler, a Catholic.

Sterilization continued as a legal regime even after eugenics ceased to be a popular movement. Thirty-one states eventually had sterilization programs, often adopting the language of the Virginia legislation that the Supreme Court approved, which had been drafted by a lawyer to increase its chances of meeting legal scrutiny. Sterilizations increased and did not cease until the 1960s. (The sterilization program in North Carolina lasted until 1977.) California, a leading Progressive state, sterilized about 20,000 people, a third or so of the almost 70,000 individuals sterilized in the United States.

Toward the end of his discussion of eugenics, G. Stanley Hall wrote of “the kingdom of some kind of superman” to which eugenics might lead. This remark foreshadowed the darkness of the Holocaust and reminds us that Hitler cited America’s eugenics movement and laws as a precedent.

Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, 269.


Judgment: SUPREME COURT OF INDIANA. November Term, 1920. On the 11th day of May, 1921, being the 147th judicial day of said November Term, 1920. Case No. 23709. Appealed from the Clark Circuit Court. Opinion and judgment pronounced by Associate Judge Hon. Howard L. Townsend. Appellants were enjoined from performing vasectomy on appellee, who is a prisoner in the Indiana Reformatory. The Chief Physician, Board of Managers and two chosen surgeons were proposing to act pursuant to the [Indiana sterilization statute]. . . . In Davis v. Berry et al. (U. S. District Court, S. D.), 216 Fed. Rep. 413,1 in passing on an Iowa statute similar to the one here in question, on page 218, the court uses this language: “The hearing is by an administrative board of officers. There is no actual hearing. There is no evidence. The proceedings are private. The public does not know what is being done until it is done. Witnesses are not produced, or, if produced, they are not cross-examined. . . . The prisoner is not advised of the proceedings until ordered to submit to the operation. . . . Due process of law means that every person must have his day in court, and this is as old as Magna Charta; that some time in the proceeding he must be confronted by his accuser and given a public hearing.” In the instant case the prisoner has no opportunity to cross-examine the experts who decide that this operation should be performed upon him. He has no chance to bring experts to show that it should not be performed; nor has he a chance to controvert the scientific question that he is of a class designated in the statute. And wholly aside from the proposition of cruel and unusual punishment, and infliction of pains and penalties by the legislative body through an administrative board, it is very plain that this act is in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution in that it denies appellee due process. The case of Davis v. Berry, supra, is interesting in its discussion of questions other than due process.2 It also cites the adjudicated cases in other states on similar statutes. The trial court was correct in enjoining appellant from performing, or causing to be performed, the operation of vasectomy upon appellee. Judgment of the trial court is therefore affirmed.

Footnotes
  1. 1. Iowa law authorized the sterilization of anyone convicted of two felonies. A federal district court in Iowa prevented the sterilization of an inmate because it held that the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement for equal protection of the law. Iowa appealed the case to the Supreme Court in 1914, but Iowa changed its law before the Court could rule and so the Court remanded the case and did not rule on it.
  2. 2. Laughlin comments: “The court discussed at length the proposition whether or not the performance of such an operation for the punishment of crime is cruel and unusual punishment, and it is clearly apparent from reading the opinion that no doubt existed in the mind of the court but that the performance of such an operation as this for the punishment of crime was cruel and unusual punishment.” Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, 212.
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