If you're just hearing about the recent forced hysterectomies in ICE custody (aaaghh, when will this administration of criminals end?), you may want to listen to a couple of podcasts/audios that give background on our country's forced sterilizations of women, often women of color and/or disabled women, in this country. And that means learning about the case Buck v Bell.
A recent one was on Radiolab, in an episode called G: Unfit. "When a law student named Mark Bold came across a Supreme Court decision from the 1920s that allowed for the forced sterilization of people deemed 'unfit, he was shocked to discover that it had never been overturned. His law professors told him the case, Buck v Bell, was nothing to worry about, that the ruling was in a kind of legal limbo and could never be used against people. But he didn’t buy it. In this episode we follow Mark on a journey to one of the darkest consequences of humanity’s attempts to measure the human mind and put people in boxes, following him through history, science fiction and a version of eugenics that’s still very much alive today, and watch as he crusades to restore a dash of moral order to the universe."
Another one from 2018 is this from Hidden Brain: Emma, Carrie, Vivian: How a Family Became a Test Case for Forced Sterilization. Carrie is Carrie Buck, as in the Buck of the Supreme Court case's name.
And finally, this Democracy Now from 2016, which is called Buck v Bell: Inside the SCOTUS case that led to forced sterilization of 70,000 and inspired the Nazis. It's an interview with Adam Cohen, author of a then-new book called Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck.
Carrie Buck (left) in 1924, with her mother Emma. From the University at Albany, SUNY, M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives.
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