Consequences

December 19, 2022

From 1927 to 1973, Virginia forcibly sterilized between 7200 and 8000 people. The Virginia Sterilization Law remained legal until 1979, and by then, Virginia came second to California in performing the most compulsory sterilizations. 

The case was not restrained by Virginia’s borders, nor the United States’. Within America, over 60,000 sterilizations were legally performed. During the Nuremberg trials after World War II, several Nazis cited Buck v. Bell as part of their defense of Germany’s sterilization laws. 

Though the 1924 Virginia Sterilization Act was eventually repealed, Buck has never been overturned. 

Fifteen years after Buck, a unanimous court ruled that Skinner v. Oklahoma outlaw punitive sterilization, as well as forcing any mandatory sterilization laws to be subject to strict scrutiny. 

However, forced sterilization is not a relic of the past. Between 1997 and 2010, compulsory sterilization was performed on approximately 1,400 women in California prisons. 

In 2020, Dawn Wooten, a nurse who worked at an ICE immigrant detainment center in Georgia, filed a complaint charging that women in the facility had “been sterilized en masse without proper consent or medical necessity. Numerous women described being coerced into surgery and confused as to why the procedure was performed. Some described being yelled at by medical staff when they resisted the procedure. Many explained that they felt as if ICE was ‘experimenting with [their] bodies.’”

From Carrie Buck to sterilization in ICE detainment centers, one thing has remained constant: it is the most vulnerable—and the most marginalized—that face the brunt of the eugenics movement. 

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