In 1973, a 36-year-old Black woman named Nial Ruth Cox entered a North
Carolina law firm with a record of her forced sterilization. Cox s revelation
ignited a shocking court case exposing decades of sterilization abuse in the name of eugenics.
Eugenics boards in 33 states oversaw the sterilization of thousands of
people between 1907 and 1977. Nearly all were classified as feebleminded
and the procedure was often performed against their will or with coerced consent.
Eugenics, or the ideological demarcation between fit and unfit reproduction,
drove the long history of forced sterilization in the United States. Among the many states with
eugenics legislation, Virginia is infamous for its legal campaign to forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck
and thereby entrench sterilization abuse as the law of the land.
The legislative framework that made possible Carrie Buck's eventual court
ordered sterilization took shape in a single afternoon. On March 20, 1924,
the Virginia state legislature passed a series of devastating legislative initiatives.
The Virginia Sterilization Act provided for the sterilization of people deemed feebleminded
or socially inadequate two incredibly broad categories that could be stretched to include
virtually any institutionalized or socially marginalized person.
Meanwhile, the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 reified the idea of white purity by
defining blacks as having one-sixteenth or more negro blood and indigenous peoples as
those having the same proportion of Indian blood , in the words of Dorothy Roberts.
With its notions of racial purity thus established, the Racial Integrity Act also
prohibited interracial marriage and specified that the clerk or deputy clerk shall withhold
the granting of the license until the registrar s office established the racial classification
of each appellate. Together, these laws set the course for eugenics in Virginia.
Just three years later, in 1927, a seventeen-year-old white girl named
Carrie Buck was at the center of debates about the state s sterilization law.
Buck was a resident of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded,
where her foster family abandoned her when she became pregnant as a result of rape.
For Buck s foster family and the doctors who recommended sterilization,
a pregnancy out of wedlock was one of the eugenic symptoms of inherent immorality.
Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld this view when he specified Buck could not choose for
herself whether to be sterilized because she is further incapacitated by congenital mental defect.
Over Buck s objections, the Court recommended that she be sterilized because,
according to the last line of their decision, three generations of imbeciles is enough.
Buck was sterilized on October 19, 1927, soon after the Supreme Court s ominous ruling.
A series of letters from Buck to Dr. John Bell and a nurse between 1927 and 1934,
reveal her awareness that she was akin to a furloughed inmate on parole.
Until her marriage in 1932, she remained a ward of her employers
for whom she provided live-in domestic work for the paltry sum of $5 per month.
During this time, she could be recalled to the Colony for any perceived infraction.
After Carrie Buck s forced sterilization, the number of states with legal provisions for the
sterilization of feebleminded and criminals ballooned. In several states, women were
institutionalized at much higher rates than men for the express purpose of being sterilized.
In the records available,
women of color were forcibly sterilized at much higher rates than white women.
For example, in North Carolina, African American women accounted for 65% of those sterilized by the
eugenics board between 1964 and 1966, a rate more than five times their population representation.
The issue of sterilization abuse and its disproportionate impact on
women of color became a rallying point for feminists of color in the 1960s and 1970s.
Groups such as the Boston-based Black lesbian feminist Combahee River Collective
placed anti-sterilization activism prominently among their commitments. The group s mission
statement in 1977 noted: Issues and projects that collective members have actually worked
on are sterilization abuse, abortion rights, battered women, rape, and healthcare.
Their inclusion of anti-sterilization activism in their struggle against racial,
sexual, heterosexual and class oppression is instructive for challenging contemporary
sterilization abuse and understanding the legacies of Carrie Buck s sterilization
after the Buck v. Bell ruling in 1927. While eugenic ideas have a long and troubling
history in the United States, these beliefs continue to negatively impact people today.
Existing laws continue to steal away reproductive autonomy and subject people
to forced sterilization, especially women of color, disabled, and incarcerated women.
A report by the National Women s Law Center and the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network
found that 31 states and Washington D.C. allowed forced sterilization of disabled people in 2021.
The report describes these laws as antithetical to disabled people s right to make decisions
about their bodies. It also contains the haunting revelation that Black disabled
women are more likely to be sterilized than white disabled women. Other reports document
the forced sterilization of immigrant women in detention centers and incarcerated women.
Almost a century after Buck s sterilization, few states have issued formal apologies for
the many thousands forcibly sterilized under eugenic statutes. North Carolina,
California, and Virginia alone authorized reparations for survivors of sterilization.
For their part, survivors and their allies oscillate between
relief at public recognition after often decades-long battles to raise awareness
and a hollow sense that no compensation could ever replace what was stolen from them.