Buck v. Bell

Hey everyone, this is Leon Napok from Fiasco and Slowburn.

On this week's episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are going back nearly 100 years to Buck v.

Bell, a case in which the Supreme Court found that forced sterilization of the mentally ill was constitutional, as long as it was done for the protection and health of the state.

33 states had a eugenics program in the early 1900s.

Most ended after World War II.

However, However, North Carolina's program ran until 1974.

The ruling, which assumed a connection between mental illness and criminality, has never been overturned.

Immigrant women coming across the border were simply sterilized against their will, often without their knowledge, thousands of them.

This is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to five to four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have burrowed into America's chest cavity, like that little alien in the 1979 movie Alien.

The Xenomore.

Sure, you fucking nerd.

I hate both of you.

Yeah.

I am Peter.

Twitter is the law boy.

I am here with Rhiannon.

Hello.

And Michael.

Hey, everybody.

And today's case is Buck v.

Bell, case from 1927.

And I know we usually cover more recent cases, but sometimes it's important to look back.

You need to watch Citizen Kane before you can really understand Avengers Infinity War.

You have to really dig into the classics.

And this is a classic.

Written by maybe the most influential Supreme Court justice of all time, Oliver Wendell Holmes.

This is a case about whether states can constitutionally engage in eugenics by sterilizing people they deem mentally unfit.

This case, I think, gets a little less attention than like Dred Scott and Plessy v.

Ferguson, but it is widely considered one of the cruelest Supreme Court decisions of all time, time, a showcase not just for the callousness of the court, but its lack of concern for the facts, the many ways in which it was and is intertwined with the most reprehensible aspects of elite American institutions.

And it's also a precursor to modern cases where the courts have endorsed the basic notion that disabled people are not inherently deserving of the rights granted to the rest of us.

So, again, you know, Oliver Wendell Holmes, maybe the single most famous lawyer in American history.

He was a Supreme Court justice from 1902 to 1932, and he was known for this sort of concise, common sense approach to the law.

He was, by the standards of his time, fairly progressive.

But don't let that fool you because this was at a time where you could get a Ph.D.

in like the shape of the Chinese skull.

So, you know, despite that reputation,

the decision here,

not the most progressive thing I've ever read.

Let's put it that way.

So, Rhiannon, talk about the background.

Let's talk eugenics.

Let's talk eugenics, folks.

Yeah, so eugenics as a belief system or just like this area of pseudo-scientific study became a thing back in the 1880s, and it really gained popularity, especially in the United States in like the early 1900s.

And when we say eugenics, we're talking about this idea that humanity can improve the genetic quality of a human population by excluding groups that are judged to be inferior.

Excluding from reproduction.

Right, right.

From right.

Excluding from the genetic pool.

Yeah.

Right.

Yes.

Yes.

And so I don't think it will come as a major surprise to anybody that this idea was all the rage in the United States among white, wealthy elites.

And it's got to be said that it was a popular trend in the progressive movement.

So for example, at the first International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, which was held in London, 42 of 58 research papers presented were authored by American researchers.

So white, wealthy Americans are all about eugenics at this time.

Now, in 1910.

Not anymore.

No, no, no.

Surely not.

Yeah, don't worry.

In 1910, the Carnegie Institute established the Eugenics Record Office, which served as a center for eugenics and human hereditary research and propaganda.

Basically, it was this great, big, beautiful think tank that was advocating for not letting quote-unquote undesirable people procreate.

And the ERO, this eugenics records office, developed a model sterilization statute promoting this idea that states should adopt sterilization laws.

And since they had it reviewed by legal experts and politicians they were saying um this law is actually it's constitutionally sound it won't be struck down so all of you guys go for it adopt these laws and be white supremacists it's like the model penal code yeah for bigots yeah exactly um well the model penal code is the model penal code

that's right That's right.

Correct.

And so the state of Virginia or the Commonwealth of Virginia, excuse me, passes.

Please do not embarrass us, Rhiannon.

We're holding ourselves out here as experts.

Do not call the Commonwealth of Virginia a state.

I apologize.

So Virginia passes its sterilization law based largely on this model language from the Eugenics Record Office.

And the result is the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924.

Basically, the text of that law says that whenever the superintendents of these state hospitals and institutions for the mentally unfit, whenever those superintendents, quote, shall be of opinion that it is for the best interest of the patients and of society that an inmate of the institution under their care should be sexually sterilized, such superintendent is hereby authorized to perform or cause to be performed by some capable physicians or surgeon the operation of sterilization on any such patient confined in such institution who is afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeblemindedness, or epilepsy.

Or epilepsy.

Right, or epilepsy or this other medical condition.

We'll just throw that in there.

Why not?

I just want to say, it's funny as hell to me, especially because this sort of stuff is done with such confidence by these people, but all of their like medical diagnoses are just vaguely identifying people who they think are stupid and then giving that a label and pretending that it's like a real medical condition.

So

you'd bring your like child to the doctor and be like, oh, you know, doctor, he's not good at math.

And the doctor would like run some tests and come back and be like, ma'am, I'm sorry to tell you this, but your child is a moron.

And they were like, oh shit.

What's wrong with Timmy?

Oh, well, yeah, he's a moron.

There's no cure.

All of the medical diagnoses are now just insults, right?

Because they're just like completely distant from any actual issue.

Like at issue in this case is whether someone is an imbecile.

Right, exactly.

A absolutely meaningless term.

And I just fucking love the idea that people were walking around with these as like actual medical diagnoses.

Right, can you imagine like a DSM back then that's like has different criteria for imbecile and feebleminded?

like a dedicated doctor being like this is a tough one to disambiguate.

They might be feeble-minded, but I'm leaning.

Yeah, we thought Johnny was an imbecile.

Turns out he's just an idiot.

Thank God.

Thank God.

Included in the text of the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 is sort of this built-in justification

that forced sterilization of the, you know, quote-unquote feeble-minded, that this is for the greater good of society.

And they put this in the text of the law.

They say, whereas many defective persons are

basically being supported at state institutions, quote, many defective persons who, if now discharged or paroled, would likely become, by the propagation of their kind, a menace to society, but who, if incapable of procreating, might properly and safely be discharged or paroled and become self-supporting with benefit to both themselves and to society.

Whereas human experience has demonstrated that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of sanity, idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy, and crime.

So

by the way, I love that they've brought epilepsy into this.

Yes.

Epilepsy is ridiculous.

There's like literally five or six like just completely fictitious ailments and then they're like, and epilepsy which apparently they were on the head uh they were nailing it with that one but also i feel like the idea that epileptics need to be like

bred out society seems a little bit strong yeah but you know like when you take a step back and look at it like it kind of makes sense that the nation's like top legal experts researchers scientists and doctors thought this because like you know at the time they think like a woman having her period every month is like a debilitating medical issue for which she like needs to take heroin or whatever like you know it's par for the course, I guess.

Yeah, that sounds pretty cool to me.

Yeah, I don't.

I've never had menstrual cramps, but heroin sounds a lot better than mitol.

Yeah, sorry, you guys were oppressed by the free drugs you got.

Okay, and an important side note: the same year that this sterilization act is passed in Virginia, the Virginia legislator also passes the Racial Integrity Act, which banned interracial marriage and was famously later struck down in Loving v.

Virginia.

So sterilization, eugenics, and racism, it's not like a very far connecting line.

No.

Right.

No.

A lot of people are going to be judgmental about this stuff and say that, you know, these states were going nuts, but you got to keep in mind, this is before the Nazis showed us that this was bad.

The Nazis took all of this stuff to its natural conclusion and people were like, oh.

they're like i see where this is headed now yeah we got to stop we gotta stop

the the are we the baddies meme but it's like america

yeah you are

by the way it's important to note though um adolf hitler looked towards a lot of this research and a lot of these laws in designing uh the apparatus the eugenesis system that that they had in nazi germany Absolutely.

Obviously, the Carnegie Institute is involved here.

Henry Ford is like a famous eugenicist and racist.

The Rockefellers are putting out, you know, this kind of quote-unquote research at the time.

This was really popular among wealthy people who had a platform to like be disseminating this stuff.

Okay, so Virginia gets this serialization law on the books, and they are basically immediately ready to implement it and fight over it and fight for it.

So, this guy, Albert Sidney Pretty, at the time in 1924, 1924, he is the superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded.

It's no five-star hotel stay, I can tell you.

I do want to apologize for constantly laughing at this stuff, but it's so fucking ridiculous.

It's absurd, right?

Exactly.

It's so cruel that it's absurd.

And so Albert Sidney Pretty, this superintendent, he files a petition to the directors of this institution to compel the sterilization of a patient named Carrie Buck.

Carrie is an 18-year-old patient at the institution, and it's reported that she has a mental age of nine years old.

In the petition where he's providing justification for why she should be sterilized, Pretty says that Buck is a threat to society, and he says that Carrie's mother had a mental age of eight, in addition to reportedly having a history of prostitution, immorality, and parenting three illegitimate children.

And so though Carrie had been adopted by by another family and attended school until sixth grade, Pretty further noted in this report that she eventually just became, quote, incorrigible.

And at the age of 17, she gave birth to an illegitimate child.

So, at that point, her adopted family said they're incapable of caring for Carrie, and they had her committed to the state colony, this institution.

They gave it their best for three, four years, but at the end of the day,

she had some premarital sex, and you got to give them to the state colony for epileptics and idiots.

And so they basically inform Carrie that she is going to undergo this sterilization procedure, and she challenges it in court.

Now, the named parties, obviously, Carrie Buck versus Bell.

Bell is the doctor, the surgeon who will perform the sterilization surgery.

So that's how we get the case name Buck v.

Bell.

Can I ask a question quick?

I didn't see see this

in my background research.

I don't know if any of you guys saw how this case came to be.

Was she like the impetus or was there people looking for plaintiffs on this or what do we know?

So it's not clear, but the case itself is collusive.

They're doing it on purpose to

bring the case so that it goes through the courts so that it will be upheld.

Okay.

I was just thinking along the lines of like somebody getting a lawyer and challenging this procedure doesn't really fit a nine-year-old's

mental capability.

Right.

But that makes sense.

The whole thing is rigged.

Yeah.

So let's talk about the law a little bit.

And this law is challenged under the 14th Amendment's due process and equal protection provisions, which say that the states shall not, quote, deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, end quote.

And so the question is whether forced sterilization imposes on the bodily integrity of these women in violation of their entitlement to due process of law and or equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

And the court holds that it is not a violation of the 14th Amendment, finding that all three generations of Buck women were, quote, feeble-minded and quote, promiscuous, and that the state had a legitimate interest in their sterilization.

And the court starts out by stating the reasons for the law, saying that the sterilization of mental defectives is for the benefit of the patient and society generally, and that the sterilization allows mental asylums and similar institutions to discharge those patients without concern that they might reproduce.

That's awful.

That's so awful.

Yeah.

And the court notes, you know, quote, experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, et cetera.

Unquote.

I love the et cetera there.

You know, you know, these guys.

But note, that's a direct lifting from the Virginia statute that's at issue, right?

Like they just, they adopt it.

It's a very weird thing to say experience has shown when we're talking about like a scientific question, right?

Right, right.

There's another etc.

that I really liked when he's describing the law.

And he says, look, the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilation of mental defectives under careful safeguard, etc.

Like, whatever.

You know.

Whatever that entails.

So a couple of things.

One is this opinion is like three pages long.

Yeah.

And the dissent is silent.

It's just someone saying they dissent.

And then also you have this like, et cetera, thing.

Being Being a Supreme Court justice back then was the shit.

You didn't have to do anything.

It's like, yeah, you know,

insanity, imbecility,

et cetera.

Let me throw an etc.

in here.

I don't know what copies you read, but the PDF I found included both briefs, which brought it to

a total of eight pages.

Oh my God.

That's right.

I found that one too.

They're like the briefs were about two pages each.

Worth the read.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

So one key theme here is like the sheer confidence the court has in what is now clearly completely outmoded science, right?

Right, right.

And that combines with this sort of underlying moral assumption that the life of a disabled person is both a burden on society and less important than that of a non-disabled person.

Yes.

And the court explains that the superintendents of the institutions like the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded must, before sterilizing anyone, petition their board.

There would be evidence presented, and the person could appeal the decision to sterilize them to the county circuit court.

And so Holmes is trying to say, like, look, obviously, procedurally, this is airtight, right?

We're all good.

Don't even worry about it.

And he says that the benefit to society justifies the sterilization here.

And it's worth noting that Holmes doesn't really provide any actual reasoning.

Part of this is like a relic of court decisions from the time, which were, you know, they're shorter, they're more conclusory.

But in any event, he genuinely gives zero thought in the opinion to what the burden imposed on these women actually is.

And there's no discussion about the importance of the ability to procreate if you want to or to try.

Nothing is articulated about what they're actually being subjected to.

Instead, he frames it in terms of sacrifice, saying that the general welfare often calls upon citizens to sacrifice their lives and well-being, which I guess is true in like the general sense.

But I mean, first of all, it could be used to justify literally anything.

And this is 1927.

We're about a decade out from World War I, and it seems clear that he's gesturing towards that sort of sentiment, accompanied by war and, you know, the massive human toll that faces.

But he's not talking about like, you know, the domination of Europe by like Austrians or whatever.

He's telling some lady, like, you can't have your dumb kids.

Your kids are going to be too stupid, lady.

Let me tell you about sacrifice.

And Holmes ends this opinion with what might be the most offensive few sentences in Supreme Court history.

It's awful.

This is rough.

This is a quote.

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives.

It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.

It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes.

Three generations of imbeciles is enough.

End quote, end of the opinion.

Ouch.

Three generations of imbeciles is enough.

I don't feel good.

Do you guys feel good?

No.

No.

Obviously, I mean, that is transparently horrific.

It is ridiculous.

And I don't think there's much more to say about it.

There is a fact, though, that we should discuss.

And that is that underlying all of this reasoning,

the court is accepting without question that these people are, in fact, mentally deficient somehow.

And on that front,

I have bad news.

Uh-oh.

Most likely, they were not.

And in fact, the story as we understand it appears to be fairly horrific.

Yeah, that's right.

It's like multiple layers of being horrific.

So, first, like, let's just start with the law and the court case itself.

By all accounts, the case bringing the legal challenge was actually like a purposeful act of collusion.

The state of Virginia wanted a sterilization law and they wanted it to pass legal challenge.

So, as superintendent of one of these state institutions, that guy Pritty was looking for a patient to do forced sterilization on and have it be challenged in court.

John Bell was the surgeon who performed the surgery on Kerry Buck, and he wrote in his surgical report in October 1927:

This is the first case operated on under the sterilization law, and the case was carried through the courts of the state and the United States Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of the Virginia Act.

So this was brought on purpose and Carrie Buck was the like random unconsenting party that this legal challenge was brought on.

Secondly, there is a lot of doubt that Carrie Buck was at all intellectually disabled.

to begin with.

Not only do reports from researchers and people who knew her indicate that she was, by all accounts, of average intelligence, one of the main arguments used to establish her disability was her supposed promiscuity and that she got pregnant at the age of 17, right?

Well, it turns out actually that Carrie Buck was raped by a member of the family that adopted her, and that rape resulted in her pregnancy.

And it's been reported that the family who adopted her actually had her committed to this state institution on purpose to save their reputation.

And this is what we in the law call a big oopsie daisy.

You know,

You commit someone to a horrific institution to cover up a rape, you know, some fucking Shutter Island style asylum.

And then it turns out they're not disabled at all, but you sterilize them.

Big apologies from the legal community.

Really dropped the ball on this one.

Right.

And regarding this, quote, three generations of imbeciles that Justice Holmes referred to, actually not a lot is known about Carrie's mother, Emma Buck, except that she was poor.

She was abandoned by her husband early in marriage.

After being accused of immorality, prostitution, and having syphilis, she was also committed to the same institution, this Virginia state colony for the feebleminded.

And then there's Carrie's daughter, who was named Vivian.

And like her mom, Vivian was also of reportedly average intelligence.

She attended school for a few years where she received average or even above average grades.

She died at the age of eight due to complications from measles.

But again, the cruelty of this quote, the three generations of imbeciles, there aren't even facts that support that realistically.

Also, like a society that is condemning people it deems stupid to institutions and sterilization, but can't cure the fucking measles.

Yeah.

I also have my doubts about promiscuity being like

one of the the criteria here.

Whether or not she was raped, I think that goes to, you know, just

yeah.

I mean, look, if I had to guess, they're just, it's literally a series of check boxes when they're compelling someone to, you know, to live in one of these institutions.

And they're just looking for things like, oh, she's promiscuous.

Right.

Right.

Right.

And then finally, just to highlight like how rampant this eugenics stuff was, as soon as the states got the green light from the Supreme Court on sterilization statutes like this.

The state of Virginia was so giddy for this family to not be able to reproduce that Carrie Buck's sister, Doris Buck, was also forcibly sterilized.

She actually wasn't told that that procedure was being done to her.

It happened completely without her consent during what she was told was a surgery for appendicitis.

She never knew why she couldn't conceive until she learned the real reason why in 1980, lived her whole life not knowing that this would happen to her.

Jesus.

So I want to talk a bit about

eugenics and these sort of elite academic institutions that were pushing it.

In the early 1900s, the idea of forced sterilization to eliminate heritable disorders was popular in mainstream academia, right?

Oliver Wendell Holmes authored this opinion.

He has close ties to Harvard.

He went there.

His father was dean of the medical school.

And Harvard was pushing these theories very aggressively.

A huge percentage of the scholarship about eugenics and promoting eugenics came out of Harvard.

And all of this is to say that powerful institutions in this country work in close concert.

Elite universities and instruments of government power like the court are often composed of the same people from the same socioeconomic classes.

And so you often see them serving the same interests.

And

the overlap of dubious academic work with the courts isn't like some ancient thing.

Just to give a slightly more recent example, in the 80s, the field of law and economics gained steam in academia, in legal academia, designed to more aggressively map economic theory onto the practice of law.

Yeah.

Very, very popular at the time, still maintains some popularity today.

I mean, the one thing you need to know about law and economics is that if someone is an expert in neither law nor economics, that does not rule you out from being a professor of law and economics.

That's all you need to know.

It's a bullshit little field

that just combines the most fraudulent aspects of economic theory with the law.

Most notably at the University of Chicago, right?

Law School.

That's right.

Yeah, because that's their big

center of the intellectual movement

And, you know, just a quick note before we move on.

Rhiannon referenced this earlier.

We often deal with reactionary politics on this podcast.

And, you know, obviously, I think we all believe that eugenics is fundamentally reactionary.

But it needs to be noted that it was closely tied to the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century.

I bring this up mostly because if you're a progressive or otherwise on the left, I think it's important to acknowledge that the movement got caught up in this sort of dangerous thinking at one point.

And being intellectually honest about this sort of shit is part of what separates us from the right.

Because Planned Parenthood has admitted that their founder, Margaret Sanger, believed in eugenics, and they've denounced those beliefs.

But the American conservative movement...

rather than admitting to their past failures, maintains an entire cottage industry dedicated to rewriting history to make believe that they aren't the villains the entire fucking time.

So you have these fucking weirdo freaks like Dinesh D'Souza who do nothing but churn out books saying that like, oh, the KKK were liberals actually.

And like Nazis, National Socialism, socialism's in the name.

Right, right.

And shit like that.

And that passes for actual scholarship and intellectual honesty on the right.

And it's important to just like look back, reflect on your movement's errors and

not be one of these fucking morons.

I mean, they go through all these links to say, like, yeah, back in the 1870s, the KKK were all Democrats, but like the simple question would be, what party do you think the modern KKK identifies with?

Right.

Right.

Another thing I want to point out is Buck v.

Bell hasn't been overturned.

Still on the books.

Good law.

And that's not to say that it's like consistently relied upon by the court or anything.

It's not the point we want to make entirely.

A huge component of our legal system is its reliance on the body of common law, meaning the law that comes from judicial decisions.

And that reliance is predicated on the idea that that body of law is the manifestation of reasonable and reliable legal principles that have been passed down over time.

But the reality is that the common law is littered with outdated relics of reasoning and science and history, like this case.

And that is what our law is built on.

The law is predicated on the assumption that our predecessors were eminently wise.

But of course, they had all the same flaws of judges today.

They were uninformed, biased, hubristic, and it's crucial for the legal profession to operate as if those flaws are present and not as if the passage of time has bestowed a sort of untouchability on the past, right?

The way that precedent works is that courts are made to rely on existing rules rather than question their wisdom or utility.

Obviously, the primary purpose of this is to promote consistency in the law.

But not only does it lead to the entrenchment of some horrible ideas, it's inherently conservative.

Exactly.

This sort of plainly outrageous case law can't be easily disregarded because judges are told to respect precedent.

And instead, it needs to be rooted out steadily over the course of many years to to the point where it's still on the books today.

Right.

Right.

All that being said,

it is actually true, though, that as recently as 2001, a federal appeals court and the Eighth Circuit cited Buck v.

Bell approvingly in holding that involuntary sterilization of the mentally handicapped could be constitutional with the right procedural protections, which is

pretty indistinguishable from what things are not good.

Things are not good.

Putting up the alarm.

Look, that was.

Was it pre, you said 2001.

Was it pre-911?

Yeah, exactly.

Things really changed.

Yeah.

We have to reckon with the idea that eugenics have never really left us, right?

Like this era is plainly horrible.

And I don't want to say everything's the same or whatever, but you know, like states, I think in that era sterilized 65,000 quote-unquote disabled people.

And you might think, well, when I say the eugenics era, this case is a century old, so that means forever ago, but like North Carolina was operating its program until 1974.

Wow.

And like, of course,

Rhiannon sort of gestured to this earlier, but like in the South, everywhere really, there's racial and class components to this.

In the South, for example,

this tended to fall most heavily on the black community, which interestingly enough, in its short two pages, the plaintiff's brief sort of anticipated that.

So it's not like people didn't know that that might be the case.

In Buck v.

Bell, there's saying, look, this could be turned to sterilize, you know.

black and poor people.

Right.

And there you go.

Yeah, yeah.

And we also still to this day have this idea that somehow like genetically inferior people are the ones who are more likely to commit crime.

And there's a way that white supremacy connects genetic inferiority to criminal behavior to justify still to this day this kind of eugenics-adjacent stuff in the criminal punishment system.

So, for example, in 2009, a woman in West Virginia was required to get her tubes tied at the age of 21 years old as part of the requirements of her probation deal.

The offense for which she was going on probation, marijuana possession.

Do you know who the judge was in that case and what their address was?

I do not.

I do not, actually.

Just asking, just wandering, thinking out loud.

Okay,

sure.

Yeah.

In 2017, really recently, a Tennessee judge issued a standing order that offered inmates a 30-day reduction in their sentence if they underwent some sort of long-term or permanent birth control procedure.

So that's like if men got vasectomies or if women got a four-year birth control implant.

And this idea, right, they make it legal by keeping it voluntary, right?

It's not forced on anybody.

But of course, this is super coercive.

If you're sitting in jail and you can't get out, right?

And we don't have to think long about who this disparately impacts.

A policy like this is never going to touch a rich person.

because a rich person is never going to be in the position where like they can't get out of jail at the the time that they want to get out, where their lack of resources is the thing that's keeping them locked up and repeating into the system.

And obviously, this is going to impact people of color more who are pulled into the criminal punishment system at higher rates than everybody else.

Also, like, pretty fucked up.

You only get a 30-day reduction.

Come on, man.

Can't give it, like, you can't give it three months something substantial.

Getting 30 days.

Right.

Like,

yeah, that's a really fucked up point because it, like, shows like how little they think about a person's right to reproduce.

Yeah.

Right.

And do you...

You said it was a Tennessee judge.

Do you know that judge's address?

You know,

I failed to write that down in my outline today.

Okay, well, our promise to our listeners is if we figure it out, we will let you know.

Another horrible example, just in 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting found that at least 148 female inmates in California had received tubal ligations without their consent between 2006 and 2010.

And just one year later, the Associated Press reported on at least four instances of prosecutors in Tennessee, including birth control requirements in plea deals.

So we're not like that far away from this eugenic stuff still being part of the criminal justice system for sure.

Right.

And like the birth control, it's interesting.

There's a real intersection of reproductive rights and

disability rights where like the eugenic stuff still comes up a lot.

And so there's like the Eighth Circuit case I mentioned earlier, which was that was about a woman with developmental disabilities and she had to agree to sterilization in order to regain custody of her child who had already been born, obviously, and who had been taken from her.

Okay, you can have them, but you only get one.

Right, exactly.

Wild.

It's so, it's so fucked.

Awful.

When pod favorite Brett Kavanaugh was still a judge on the DC circuit,

he wrote an opinion upholding a law that denied people with developmental disabilities the right to make their own medical decisions, which sounds like not great, but not really eugenics necessarily until you realize that two of the plaintiffs in that case had been forced to have abortions under the law.

That's how we get conservatives to support abortion,

forcing poor people to have it.

And all of a sudden they're like, actually, I get it.

Yeah.

The National Council of Disability published something in 2012 that found that 11 states still had laws on the books authorizing involuntary sterilization for people with hereditary forms of quote-unquote idiocy, imbecility, or other similar sorts of offensively and outmodedly named conditions.

Libertarians.

I wish.

And like even when people with disabilities are allowed to have kids, you know, they have their kids taken from them by protective services and shit like that.

And there's a whole culture now of sort of parents agreeing to sterilizing their kids while they're still young if they have disabilities.

Eugenics is still with us,

unfortunately, and in precisely the way that Bell conceives of it.

And you can see it with COVID, too, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It's sort of like resonating, right?

It's hard not to think of COVID

when hospitals are talking about people with disabilities not necessarily being able to get ventilators, right?

If they have to ration.

And you might think, well, look, if they have asthma, that's understandable.

But fucking Alabama had a law up until April 2020, their crisis standards of care.

Hold on, hold on a little.

I'm checking my calendar here.

Okay.

April 2020.

Up until last month,

that allowed for the denial or cessation of ventilator services for people with mental disabilities.

It's not even like

a number of years, you know, like life expectancy.

It's just literally

fucking dumb people, they don't really deserve as good or as long a life as smart people.

Right, right.

And they only changed that because like the federal government stepped in.

Right.

And then the last thing is like with COVID is like the sacrifice, right?

We talked about

when the opinion in Bucky Bell talks about sacrifice.

That doesn't sound too dissimilar from a lot of right-wingers right now talking about COVID, whether it's like, well, look, we got to reopen the economy.

And if some people die, well, like, I got to get my fucking triple dipper at Chili's.

And

those southwestern egg rolls hit different, you know?

Yeah, that's that's right.

That's in my order.

You better believe it.

The other thing that sounds like remarkably familiar is when Holmes talks about not having to deal with their children being criminals, which is like literally an argument in freakonomics that a bunch of like sort of pseudo-intellectual types thought was like so persuasive that the legalization of abortion led to a downtick in crime 20 years later because all of a sudden all these undesirables were not having kids.

Right.

Which is it's just straight eugenics is what that is.

And bullshit pseudoscience.

Yeah, but not even that.

Right.

All of this to say that Buck v.

Bell is not exactly a relic of the past, right?

No.

This case is unique only in how concisely and obviously it brutalizes these women.

But there is a tradition in American legislation of laws that take for granted that there are genetically superior and genetically inferior classes of people.

And courts have failed to address them as the obvious violations of constitutional rights and human dignity that they are.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, what comes to mind when I think about this case and how eugenics kind of have made their way, especially into our criminal system, I think a lot about like right-wing narratives about supposed personal responsibility and morality and how those ideas really purposely ignore the relationship between what is personal and individual and the system, what is systemic.

And that's because people on the the right don't want to account for a system that would meet everyone's needs, right?

They want there to be a separation between what the system provides for all of us and the horrible things that happen to people in their lives.

And so it's this kind of making it about a very individual, individualized reading of kind of like how a person's life plays out rather than being about, you know, poor people or minorities needing access to resources to live good lives.

The idea that you can stomp out crime by sterilizing criminals is fundamentally at odds with every expert on crime's understanding of how it originates and manifests.

That sort of thinking is endemic to the conservative movement and to conservative ideology.

There is a

a specific intent on their part

to take systemic problems and atomize them down to a personal level so that the systemic issues do not need to be addressed and instead

individual people can be blamed.

You can see that in like things like unemployment, right?

If you don't have a job, conservatives would say it's your fault, right?

How do they explain unemployment going up by tens of millions of people when COVID happens, right?

They don't have a coherent solution for problems like that

because their entire ideology is predicated around taking systemic issues and blaming people who are functionally victims of those issues exactly for them.

Right.

Right.

Their solution is open it back up.

Right.

Right.

Right.

The solution.

When people don't

go out.

I mean,

fuck you.

Yeah.

As a small business owner, you know, I only own three used car dealerships.

I want to make my fucking employees come in.

And if they get sick, whatever, fuck it.

They don't deserve unemployment benefits.

And,

you know, and if nobody shows up, well, you know, we should get the National Guard to march them.

I'll tell you, the National Guard does not need to march me down to Chili's.

I miss it.

And look, I mean, this type of thinking is why we can't end this episode saying, thank God

society has moved on.

And,

you know, the reasoning in Buck v.

Bell is something you would never hear of now because we're all sitting in our apartments waiting for a fucking disease to burn through the population so that we can all go, you know, start commuting to work again.

Next week is Burwell v.

Hobby Lobby.

Hobby Lobby is a case about whether international

smugglers of stolen antiquities can decide who does and does not get birth control.

That's right.

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54 is presented by Westwood One and Prologue Projects.

This episode was produced by Kacha Kunkova with editorial oversight by Leon Napok and Andrew Parsons.

Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at ChipsNY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.

From the Westwood One Podcast Network.