Wall Street Opinion Journal CHRISTINE ROSEN Tuesday, February 28, 2006

A bad idea bred of good intentions.

In 1927, physicians at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg sterilized a young woman named Carrie Buck. Although doctors at state institutions across the country had performed sterilizations before, Carrie’s case was unusual. Her sterilization had received the imprimatur of the U.S. Supreme Court. In Buck v. Bell, the court upheld the state of Virginia’s right to sterilize, forcibly, so-called feeble-minded individuals. “It is better for all the world,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for the majority, “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.” Holmes concluded: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”