Post-Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: Buck v. Bell and Bodily Autonomy
The Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, while a core 20th century event, carries its significance into modern politics and remains a daunting reality for 19 states in the U.S. While other Supreme Court cases from this era are now discredited because of advanced research and policy development, the decision in Buck was never overturned formally. The truth that the legal foundation still maintains state-sponsored bodily control should be publicly confronted and addressed, especially in view of the facts of the case. To elucidate, in 1927, the Supreme Court was shown the case of Carrie Buck. The state of Virginia was presented with the question of whether or not they could forcibly sterilize somebody, in this case Buck, who was publicly deemed as “feebleminded.”
The case’s instigation was under the aegis of Dr. Albert Priddy, who specifically chose Carrie as a “perfect candidate” to test Virginia’s eugenics law. Carrie was the daughter of Emma Buck, a woman already institutionalized at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. At the time, medical terms like “feebleminded” were utilized as stigmatizing labels that weren’t properly proven to have meaning through research. However, their popularity and the perpetuation of their unchecked usage led to Carrie’s incorrect prosecution. In addition to Carrie’s relation to her medically habituated mother, at the time of the case, Carrie herself had recently given birth to an "illegitimate" daughter, Vivian. The child had been a product of the sexual harrasment and rape of her mother; despite this knowledge, Carrie’s foster family utilized her pregnancy as means to deem her “feebleminded” and “promiscuous.”
Her foster family’s characterization of her allowed her to be committed to a state institution, and to hide the unjust assault she had faced. Furthermore, eugenic experts at the time used Vivian’s birth to “prove” that Carrie inherited sexual misconduct and a lack of moral sense from her mother, who also had some illegitimate children. Once the hereditary nature of this “defect” was established, the state could justify forcibly sterilizing Carrie. By extension, her daughter, Vivian was labeled as “not quite normal” and feebleminded at only seven months old. Carrie’s tragic situation was finalized by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose decision contributed to transforming eugenics from a social theory into an actual legal tool. In order to support his decision, Holmes pulled from the 1905 Supreme Court decision Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which regarded smallpox vaccinations. This case, making these vaccinations compulsory, set the precedent that individual liberty was not absolute and could be regulated to protect the public. In the case of the 1905 decision, the public’s health was at risk, allowing the state to demand a seemingly small sacrifice of simply vaccinating everyone.
However, in Carrie’s case, the sacrifice was much larger. If she lost her reproductive ability as a result of the state’s decision, Justice Holmes argued, it would be simply protecting the public from “socially inadequate” offspring. This curt verdict held such large weight because of Carrie’s journey throughout the legal system preceding it. On paper, the state of Virginia, leading up to this verdict, was doing everything required to fairly provide Carrie with a hearing, a chance to present her evidence, and a court-appointed attorney. The reality was an orchestrated performance that was made to disadvantage her. For example, her attorney, Irving Whitehead, was found to be in close relation with the eugenics proponents and even a former board member of the organization that wanted to sterilize Carrie.
Therefore, instead of working in her defense throughout the case and hearing, Whitehead intentionally overlooked cross-examining “experts” and the actual evidence of the sexual harassment Carrie endured. The operations of Carrie’s case demonstrated that the simple fact that one was given due process (in accordance with what it requires on paper) could be deemed meaningless if it presents conflict from within. In full, the case was flawed from the start and was simply taken on to lose so that the state could gain favorable precedent on the Supreme Court level.
The overarching legal impact of Holmes’s decision in this case extended past United States borders. The most jarring and appalling validation of the self-subversive nature of Carrie’s case and the idea of “sacrificing” for the public good without consent was that of the Nuremberg Trials in post-World War II Germany. When many Nazi doctors and officials were put on trial for their horrific crimes against humanity, specifically their mandatory sterilization programs, their lawyers cited Buck v. Bell. The idea that the United States, a leading democratic nation, had already founded a eugenics standard. They cited Holmes’s words regarding “preventing the manifest unfit from continuing their kind” in specific, acting as proof that their ideas were a result of long-established legal philosophy. Beyond the situation in the Nuremberg Trials, the legal precedent set in Buck v. Bell was again utilized in the mid-20th century. In Relf v. Weinberger (1973), it was revealed that federally funded clinics were still implementing the “public good” argument to sterilize poor Black women, who were often under the threat of losing their welfare benefits. This case especially depicted that the harmful “imbecility” labels from Carrie’s era was simply replaced by “cost burden” in the future.
As demonstrated by the Nuremberg Trials and Relf v. Weinburger, the case’s verdict made way for a paradigm in modern legal mechanisms, even as words like “imbecility” have faded from contemporary medical vocabulary. A reason for this is because of the lack of reversal when it comes to Carrie’s case. Unlike other landmark U.S. cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, (which was overturned by Brown v. Board) Buck was never blatantly turned over. This pushes the idea that, in theory, the state’s right to prioritize a public wellbeing over recognizing one’s individual liberties remains a plausible argument for the government. As of February and March of 2026, many legislative sessions nationwide are struggling with the legacy of Buck v. Bell. Many states have issued apologies for their own past eugenics programs, although 19 others maintain language in their regulations that could foster interpretations allowing forced sterilization. This affirms the underlying legal ideology that if your existence, or your offspring’s, could be interpreted as a drain for the public (in terms of treasury, welfare, etc.), your right to your bodily integrity becomes tentative.