Buck v. Bell (1927)

Some points to consider:

• Harry Laughlin, his colleagues at the Eugenics Record Office, and eugenicists in the USA believed that feeble-minded, immoral, criminal, and diseased people should not procreate, or else the American "stock" would decrease in quality.
• The tools used to identify these "inferior traits," such as the I.Q. test, are fundamentally flawed and biased. In addition, most of these "inferior traits" are influenced more by environment than genetics.
• In order to prevent the quality of American "stock" from declining, eugenicists pushed for state sterilization laws. The goal of the sterilization laws was to forcibly perform surgery on men or women deemed inferior, so that they could not procreate and pollute the gene pool.
• The Virginia sterilization law was the test case to go in front of the Supreme Court. The Court's 1927 ruling stated that Virginia's sterilization law was constitutional, and it opened the floodgates. By 1934, 24 states passed similar laws, and more than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the United States through the 1970s.
• Carrie Buck, the woman named in the case, was a victim. Her pregnancy was the result of rape. There is no reliable evidence that she or her child or her mother were "feeble-minded," a word that carries no real scientific meaning, anyway. Furthermore, both the prosecution and the defense in her case supported her sterilization and Virginia's law. The case was deliberately framed by both sides so the Court would approve the law.