Eugenics and Other Evils

Jun 5, 2019 by

by Justin Dyer, Public Discourse:

The eugenic search for good genes comes at the cost of human dignity and human equality, and leaves by the wayside the dogma of the sanctity of human life. Rather than warning us that eugenics can happen here, Thomas’s dissent lays out the case that it already has happened here, and the state has a compelling interest in preventing its return.

G.K. Chesterton opened his 1924 book Eugenics and Other Evils by warning that a “blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.” The hatchet in the air was eugenics, but the blow had already hit its target in the United States. In a Supreme Court case decided three years later, Buck v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote an opinion upholding a recently enacted Virginia statute providing for the forced sterilization of those suffering from “idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy”—over the protests of 17-year-old Carrie Buck, who was not so feeble-minded as to be blind to the injustice being perpetrated against her.

Allowing the state to surgically remove Buck’s Fallopian tubes, over a lone dissenting vote cast by the Court’s only Catholic, Justice Pierce Butler, Holmes wrote for the Court: “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.” Buck was one of 60,000 people who were forcibly sterilized in the United States in the twentieth century, as Clarence Thomas noted in his recent concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, a certiorari order that artfully tabled the question whether the state of Indiana may lawfully prohibit abortions chosen because of the sex, race or disability of the unborn child whose life is terminated. Thomas’s “dangerous idea”—as Ross Douthat recently described it—is that the sordid history of eugenics in the United States remains relevant to our ongoing constitutional disputes about abortion.

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