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Virginia's law served as a model for similar laws in 30 states, under which 50,000 U.S. citizens were sterilized without their consent. During the Nuremberg war trials, Nazi lawyers cited Buck v. Bell as acceptable precedent for the sterilization of 2 million people in its "Rassenhygiene" (race hygiene) program. The Supreme Court's decision in Buck v. Bell resulted in only one letter of sympathy t…
Dr. Albert Priddy, the first superintendent of the colony, advocated eugenics--the controlled mating of humans to "improve" the species--as society's best response to the presence of those he called "mental defectives." In the seven years prior to Carrie Buck's arrival, he had sterilized 75 to 100 young women without their consent, claiming that he had operated to cure "pelvic disease." In 1924 th…
On 19 November 1924, Buck v. Priddy was argued before Judge Bennett Gordon in the Circuit Court of Amherst County. Aubrey Strode represented Dr. Priddy, who had come to have Buck declared feebleminded and suitable for compulsory sterilization. Irving Whitehead, a lifelong friend to Strode and one of the first board members of the colony, represented Buck in a manner that seems to have been halfhea…
In the brief he submitted to the Supreme Court, Whitehead claimed Fourteenth Amendment protection of a person's "full bodily integrity." He also predicated the "worst kind of tyranny" if there were no "limits of the power of the state (which, in the end, is nothing more than the faction in control of the government) to rid itself of those citizens deemed undesirable." Strode, in contrast, likened …
Laws similar to the Virginia statutes were passed in 30 other states, leading to the forcible sterilization of more than 50,000 people, including Carrie Buck's sister Doris. Harry L. Laughlin, author of the model sterilization act adapted by Aubrey Strode for Virginia, made his draft available to state and foreign governments, and his model became Germany's Hereditary Health Law in 1933. In apprec…
Eugenics is a social and scientific theory that promotes the improvement of the human race through selective breeding. The idea became popular during the late nineteenth century; Sir Francis Galton is recognized as the "intellectual father of modern eugenics"; Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection in 1859 introduced the concepts behind eugenics. Eugenics concepts have been appl…
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