Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash
On a nearly still and moonlit night last week, some 75 people formed a circle on Asilomar State Beach around a sand pit ringed by seaweed. Four dancers swayed around the pit to the sound...
Aggregated News
“Stop Forced Sterilization” poster by Rachael Romero,
San Francisco Poster Brigade, 1977
Courtesy of Rachael Romero through Library of Congress
“In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority in 1927’s Buck v. Bell, the state could—and should—”prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Forced sterilization, the court held, was not only legal but laudable.
In 1924, 17-year-old Carrie Buck was institutionalized, having been deemed “feebleminded” on the grounds of “promiscuous” behavior. In reality, Buck was raped by her foster family’s nephew. Three years later, with the Court’s blessing, Virginia’s “State Colony of Epileptics and Feeble Minded” sterilized Buck against her will. The decision, passed at the height of the 20th-century eugenics movement, has never been overturned.
To this day, 30 states and Washington, DC, still have laws on the books that allow for the practice—and just two, Alaska and North Carolina, have laws that fully ban the nonconsensual sterilization of disabled people, according to a 2022 report from the National Women’s Law Center. There’s no official...