This 1927 eugenics ruling has relevance today

A book about eugenics in United States law draws connections to abortion rights today.

In 1927, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision that legal scholars generally consider to be among the worst in its history. In the landmark case, Buck v. Bell, the court affirmed that states had the right to forcibly sterilize “feebleminded and socially inadequate” people to prevent them from having children.

“Who gets to decide whether you become a parent? And who gets to decide what is done—or not done—to your body?”

The decision bolstered America’s burgeoning eugenics movement, which proclaimed to improve humanity through selective breeding. In ruling against Carrie Buck, a young woman residing in a Virginia state mental institution, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., famously wrote “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

That phrase echoes in the title of Georgia State University legal historian Paul Lombardo’s 2008 book, Three Generations, No Imbeciles (Johns Hopkins University Press, new edition 2022), the first fully documented account of the Buck case. The work revealed how Buck was misrepresented in court and detailed how the decision influenced public attitudes and the law.

“Most people think that eugenics is something from the distant past, but it has come back into the public conversation in a big way in the last 30 years,” says Lombardo, professor of law. “We’re still wrestling with questions about how we might manipulate heredity and how those impulses might mirror what the eugenics movement was driven by.”

This month, Three Generations, No Imbeciles is being rereleased with a new afterword that identifies the role the Buck story plays in abortion laws.

Here, Lombardo talks about why this nearly 100-year-old case continues to resonate today:

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