Facing Carrie Buck

Abstract

hree generations of imbeciles are enough.' Few phrases are as well known among scholars of bioethics as this remark by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in his opinion in Buck v. Bell. The Buck case arose as a challenge to a 1924 Virginia law authorizing the sexual sterilization of people designated as socially inadequate. The law explicitly adopted eugenic theory, affirming the proposition that tendencies to crime, poverty, mental illness, and moral failings are inherited in predictable patterns. The social costs of those conditions could be erased, the eugenicists thought, and Carrie Bucks case went to court to establish a constitutional