The Right to Reproduce

We've all thought it in our heads, maybe even said it aloud: Some people really just shouldn't reproduce.

We might have thought it but we probably wouldn't support a law legalizing it (well, at least I wouldn't. . .Nazi Germany, no thanks). Little did I know that the United States did have laws regarding sterilization for repeat chicken thieves, and that the Supreme Court actually agreed.

Finally getting into the "sexy" subjects in constitutional law, we discussed many things today including the right to contraceptives, the right to abortion, and something that most of us probably didn't know was contentious: the right to reproduce.

You see back in the day, there used to be laws calling for the sterilization of individuals for "the health of the [person] and the welfare of society." Sometimes this applied to people convicted of committing 3 crimes (as my Professor said, "Three Strikes and you're sterilized!") and sometimes it would be applied to people in mental institutions.

In one of the most callous (to the point of funny) decisions I've ever read by the Supreme Court, Justice Holmes affirmed the sterilization law in Buck v. Bell, where the state wanted to sterilize a "feeble minded" woman* who's condition had run in the family for at least three generations. The usually very eloquent Justice Holmes argues that sterilization is good:

. . . In order to prevent the nation from being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . .Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Ouch.

*Footnote: They later found out that the "feeble minded" woman they sterilized, one of 20,000 sterilizations in 1935, was actually a woman of normal intelligence.