Paul A. Lombardo

A US Public Health Service study conducted after World War II led to a research scandal involving the intentional infection of 1300 Guatemalans with syphilis and other STIs. That news initially prompted an apology by President Obama to the President of Guatemala and an investigative report from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Despite promises from the US Department of Health and Human Services to invest $1.8 million to "improve the treatment and prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases," there is no record that such funding nor any money to compensate the families of people victimized in the research debacle has reached Guatemala. Litigation followed public disclosures. This article analyzes the litigation and explores the likelihood that this lawsuit may represent another episode in the re-victimization of people in Guatemala who still await redress for the wrongs done to their families more than 70 years ago.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough." (1) Few phrases are as well known among scholars of bioethics as this remark by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in his opinion in Buck v. Bell. The Buck case arose as a challenge to a 1924 Virginia law authorizing the sexual sterilization of people designated as "socially inadequate." The law explicitly adopted eugenic theory, affirming the proposition that tendencies to crime, poverty, mental illness, and moral failings are inherited in predictable patterns. The social costs of those conditions could be erased, the eugenicists thought, and Carrie Buck's case went to court to establish a constitutional precedent and ratify the practice of eugenic sterilization. The sterilization law received a thundering endorsement from the U. S. Supreme Court in 1927. Holmes, by then perhaps the most revered judge in America, wrote an opinion that proclaimed: "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 who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...." His comment about generations of imbeciles was intended to summarize the evidence introduced in court about Carrie, her mother, and her daughter. Holmes' opinion became the rallying cry for American eugenicists. Within a decade of the decision, eugenic sterilization was enshrined in the laws of a majority of American states; the practice of state-mandated surgery remained intact for nearly three-quarters of the twentieth century, generating at least 60,000 victims. When I met Carrie Buck in December 1982, it was clear that her frailty reflected the trials of a long, hard life. Her death only three weeks later was a surprise to no one. Weak from the infirmities of old age, she spoke sparingly, saving the little energy she had. In our brief conversation, little was said of the Supreme Court case that had settled her fate years earlier. In the decades since that meeting, I have searched for evidence that would shed light on the "three generations" condemned in Holmes's chilling phrase, particularly the young woman whose infamy it insured. Slowly, the search yielded startling results. Virginia mental health agency records revealed that the sterilization law was originally written to protect a doctor who feared malpractice lawsuits from patients who had endured his freelance, coerced sterilizations. Those records also confirmed that the lawyer paid to defend Carrie Buck actually betrayed her, by neglecting to challenge the claims of eugenicists who testified at her trial and colluding with the state's lawyer to guarantee that the sterilization law would remain in force. (2) School report cards demonstrated the intelligence of Vivian, Carrie's daughter. The grade book I found showed her to be an "honor roll" student, contradicting the impression of trial witnesses that as an infant she was "peculiar," "not quite normal," and probably "feebleminded." (3) Carrie's case turned out to be less about mental illness than about moralism, and the comments about her illegitimate baby served to hide the fact--confirmed by Carrie herself--that rape by a relative of her foster parents had left her pregnant. But the records of lawyers and bureaucrats could never provide a complete perspective on Carrie Buck's story. As for my talk with Carrie: an aging woman's final recollections of the most painful memories of her adolescence were understandably brief, and some details continued to elude me. How did seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck feel as she faced a trial that would determine her future as a mother? What did this girl, described in court records as having "a rather badly formed face," really look like in 1924? Similar questions remained about the other two generations of the Buck family: Carrie's mother, Emma, and the baby Vivian. Picturing Three Generations Years after Carrie's sterilization, Dr. …

The Supreme Court decided Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in 2019. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in the case claimed there was a direct connection between the legalization of abortion, in the late 20th Century, and the beginnings of the birth control movement a full three quarters of a century earlier. “Many eugenicists,” Thomas argued, “supported legalizing abortion.”

Justice Samuel Alito highlighted similar claims in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, citing a brief entitled “The Eugenic Era Lives on through the Abortion Movement.” That brief was an echo of Justice Thomas’ misguided attempt at history in the Box opinion. Similar claims reoccur in Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s opinion in the Texas mifepristone case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

These false claims are the focus of this article. There is no evidence that early leaders of the eugenics movement supported abortion as part of the movement for birth control. It is accurate to describe those leaders as anti-abortion, and their followers as people who condemned abortion for moral, legal, and medical reasons.

ABSTRACT Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell (Johns Hopkins University Press) tells the story of the 1927 U. S. Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which approved laws allowing states to perform surgery in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. In the Buck case the Supreme Court endorsed involuntary sterilization as a tool of government eugenic policy, setting the stage for similar laws in the majority of states. The case is most often remembered by the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., opinion, which ended in the rhetorical climax: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Paul Lombardo sets out in this book to challenge the accuracy of the Holmes opinion, and recount in detail the events that brought Buck to the Supreme Court. The Introduction to the book retraces the author's path in discovering the major documents and records that revealed the story of the Buck case, and sets forth a summary of the book's thesis and direction. The Prologue provides a brief description of the trial of Carrie Buck, and the role of Arthur Estabrook as expert eugenic witness.

In this personal narrative the author recounts his experiences teaching bioethics in Pakistan. He notes the different moral, cultural and legal environments of Pakistan as compared to the United States, and in particular, the ways in which subtle interpretations of Sharia law shape bioethical reflections as well as the biomedical legal environment. As he argues, any attempt to export models of bioethics from one country to another with no attention to social and cultural differences is a recipe for failure. To presume that all ethical considerations are universal is to devalue moral traditions that differ from our own, and dismiss cultural values of other societies.

The goal of this article is to fill the existing gap in the history of eugenics by presenting a detailed analysis of the origins of the Pioneer Fund. Pioneer is a foundation chartered in 1937 to support and publicize study on heredity and eugenics and the problems of race betterment. The paper focuses on the role of Harry Laughlin, one of he most successful publicists of the racial radical branch of the American eugenics movement, and Wickliffe Draper, a wealthy New Yorker who endowed the Pioneer Fund. The paper explores several archival collections, tracing contacts among Laughlin, Draper and the Nazi scientists whose work informed Hitler\u27s racial hygiene movement. Harry Laughlin received an honorary degree from the Nazi-controlled University of Heidelberg as a pioneer in the science of race cleansing, only three months before the Pioneer Fund was incorporated. Wickliffe Draper recognized Laughlin\u27s successes in the eugenics movement by then naming him as the first President ...

During the 20th Century thirty-two US state legislatures passed laws that sanctioned coercive sexual sterilization as a solution to the purported detrimental increases in the population of “unfit” or “defective” citizens. While both scholarly and popular commentary has attempted to attribute these laws to political parties, or to broad and poorly defined ideological groups such as “progressives,” no one has identified the political allegiance of each legislator who introduced a successfully adopted sterilization law, and the governor who signed it. This paper remedies that omission. It also catalogues the political parties of the lawmakers and governors who were instrumental in passing bills that were subsequently vetoed, as well as the profession/occupation of lawmakers as a possible clue to their support of sterilization laws.  In light of these findings, it is clear that knowing a legislator or governor’s political party is of little value in explaining the success of sterilization laws. Similarly, using words like “progressive” to signal historically “eugenic” enactments obfuscates the changing nature of political parties and the heterogeneity of political ideologies over time. Since almost half of all successful sterilization bills were sponsored by physicians or other legislators whose occupation was related to the health sciences, identifying the occupation of a lawmaker also provides informative, but hardly definitive, data.

This essay will focus on the history of eugenics, particularly as that idea was employed in the United States as a justification for laws adopted in the 19th and 20th Century. I will describe the impact of eugenic theory in the United States, where it enjoyed widespread popularity, and trace how some practices described as “eugenic” spread internationally. I will then explore why—apart from the horrific practices it eventually led to, ranging from coercive sterilization to genocide-the underlying hopeful message of eugenicists was popular for so long. Finally, I will describe how the word “eugenics” is now coming back into common use. In one case it has been revived in the service of political and rhetorical goals, and the meaning it had within its earlier historical context has been distorted.

"This presentation, "The Legacy of American Eugenics: Buck v. Bell in the Supreme Court", was given by Dr. Paul A. Lombardo on Thursday, February 9th, 2012, in Kahn Auditorium in the A. Alfred Taubman Biomedical Research Science Building at The University of Michigan. Dr. Lombardo discussed details of the Buck case, and how it became one of the symbolic high points for the eugenic movement in the United States as the keynote address for the opening reception of the Holocaust Memorial Museum Exhibit "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race", hosted by the Taubman Health Sciences Library at the University of Michigan from February 3, 2012 through April 3, 2012.

The "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race" exhibit includes a segment on Buck v. Bell, the 1927 United States Supreme Court case that endorsed state laws mandating the eugenic sterilization of "feebleminded" and "socially inadequate" people in state institutions. That case and the laws that it validated preceded the 1934 Nazi law for sterilizing the 'hereditarily diseased" under which more than 400,000 operations occurred in Nazi Germany."