May 2, 1927
American criminology in the 1920's was built around several categories distinguishing those individuals who were more or less capable of reform. By the 1920's, criminologists had developed the category of the "feebleminded": not severely mentally disabled (an "idiot" in the terminology of the time), but not "normal" either. Such a condition was held to be hereditary. Institutions for the epileptic and feebleminded were set up in many of the United States, sometimes sterilizing the inmates to protect the State from their propagating more of the same.
Buck versus Bell, heard before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927, was heard to decide the Constitutionality of involuntary sterilization. Carrie Buck was a minor sent to the Virginia State Colony of Epileptics and Feeble Minded, and was to be sterilized under Virginia's new statute of 1924 enabling salpingectomy, or surgical sterilization, "for the protection and health of the state." John Bell, the superintendent of the State Colony, had won two previous rulings by the lower courts; the Supreme Court was now to decide. Their decision placing the health of the nation over the rights of the individual legitimated sterilization procedures in Virginia from 1927 until 1974.
The following is the Supreme Court's ruling. It was written by a leading progressive of the time, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.