The ways in which disabled people have been treated has shifted vastly over the years, but in the big picture, they have only started to receive humane treatment within the past half century. Before the 1970s, disabled people were viewed as lesser, and they were treated as lesser. They did not receive many of the human rights that should be guaranteed to everyone, and this is just in the U.S, in other countries, there are still extreme disparity with the treatment of people with disabilities. It is also safe to say that even in the U.S, there is still a far cry from equality.
One hot button issue in the news recently was the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This case involves the reproductive rights of women, and their ability to get a legal abortion, but there was another Supreme Court case that discussed reproductive rights that is rarely heard about, and that case is Buck v. Bell, which decided that forced sterilization of disabled people would be allowed, and this court case has not been overturned. For background, sterilization is when a person undergoes a procedure to not be able to reproduce, and when this is humanely done, the person gives consent to the operation. In the case of disabled people, this is not always the case. Sometimes they do not have a say, and in the early to mid-1900s, public opinion backed this idea. People believed that America was losing its power hold that it had, and so their solution was to blame people for this decline (Conrad, 2020). This led to the targeting of two specific groups of people, those that were disabled and immigrants. It was also around the time of eugenics, which was the belief that there were desired traits, and the people with the desired traits should be the ones having children, and the people with undesirable traits should not be able to have children.
So countries like the U.S and Germany decided that the best way to go about implementing this idea of eugenics was to forcefully sterilize the people they considered undesirable. In America, there was a total of 60,000 people forcefully sterilized (Cohen, 2012). There was one state that was more complicit than the rest, and that state was California. California was responsible for about one third of these sterilizations. Their reputation for such was so good that Nazi Germany reached out to California for tips on running an efficient sterilization operation.
Nazi Germany ended up sterilizing over 400,000 people (Epstein, 2015). The Nazis had a law that was enacted in 1933 that allowed this sterilization. Initially if someone was considered for sterilization, they would go to court, and a case would be held, but this was more of a formality, because just about everyone who was put on trial ended up being sentenced to sterilization, so it was really more of a witch hunt than due process. In both the U.S and Germany women were more likely to be the ones sterilized, and Germany also used this time to do some medical testing as well, so not only were disabled people having their ability to reproduce taken away without any say, but they were also being subject to medical tests as well without consent, very inhumane treatment.
In 1927, the U.S had a case reach the Supreme Court that was about forcefully sterilizing disabled people. That case was Buck v. Bell in 1927, and the result of this case was that the states received the power to sterilize people that were in public institutions (Antonios, 2012). They argued that this would prevent the “defective” genes from being hereditary. The case was about the Buck family, and it specifically involved Carrie Buck. They argued that her mother was not of sound mind, and that her mother passed that on to Carrie, and they said that Carrie passed it on to her daughter Vivian. During the trial, the prosecution brought pieces of evidence and professional witnesses, but Buck’s defense did not call any witnesses, or even really try to argue back. There was only one judge with a dissenting opinion on the court, but they did not write out why. The reason Carrie was initially institutionalized was because she became pregnant at the age of 17 and was not married, so her foster family sent her away. Lombardo investigated the case further, and he interviewed Carrie before she died. He found that she had received good grades when she was in school (1985). He also reported she was raped, and that was the cause of her becoming pregnant. Also Carrie’s sister had been sterilized, and she had been told she was receiving another operation, and she did not find out what happened until years later. So the Supreme Court basis for the forced sterilization of thousands upon thousands of people was based on evidence that was not factual, but it was largely celebrated as a victory.
So that was the main reason, but forced sterilization did start happening before the 1900s. In the 1800s they had a different reasoning for doing these forced sterilizations. They believed that if they sterilized people with disabilities, that it would take their disabilities away (Lombardo, 1985). Often, these sterilizations were more brutal than the ones that would occur in the 1900s. In these cases, the men would be full on castrated, and there were also other forms of mutilation of reproductive organs that occurred. They believed that this would help to limit the amount of people that the U.S would have to support financially. They also argued that it would help to limit inappropriate sexual behavior, but this reason was less so than the saving of money.
There were two main reasons why forced sterilization largely stopped, and that was due to World War II ending. The first reason has to do with the fall of Nazi Germany, and the realization of all the atrocities that they were perpetuating. When the people in the U.S saw the depth of the Nazi eugenics program, the U.S realized how awful a goal they were trying to achieve (Conrad, 2020). As previously mentioned, the Nazis ended up sterilizing over 400,000 people, and hundreds of them died during surgery, but as the Nazis time in power progressed, so did their actions towards people they wanted to disenfranchise, to the point where mass murder was occurring to try and achieve their goals of creating a perfect race. The U.S saw this and did not want to follow in those footsteps.
The other reason why forced sterilizations largely stopped was due to the veterans returning from World War II. World War II was a war of attrition; it was incredibly bloody and gruesome. So the soldiers that were there went through a lot, some of it mental, and some of it physical, and in many cases, it was both. When the soldiers came back to America, it helped to soften the public opinion on disabled people (Conrad, 2020). There were soldiers who had lost limbs, and this now classified them as physically disabled. Also at this time, PTSD and other mental illnesses that are brought about by being in combat and witnessing these brutal scenes, brought about the softening of the public’s stance on mental illness. This meant that by the 1970s, about thirty years after World War II, forced sterilization of disabled people had largely stopped, but it was not completely gone.
There was not another case that made it to the Supreme Court to overturn Buck v. Bell, so to this day there is no national law about making forced sterilizations illegal, but that does not prevent states from making laws banning forced sterilizations. Sadly, only two states have made laws banning forced sterilizations (NWLC, 2022). Those two states are North Carolina and Alaska. The NWLC also brought up an interesting point about the laws in one of the states, they said that the law does provide protection, but it also is the cause of some harm, not only does it prevent disabled people form forcefully being sterilized, but even if a disabled person chooses to be sterilized, they are not able to be sterilized.
So two states have laws banning forced sterilizations, but there are many other states, and their situations are more variable. 31 states still have laws in place that allow forced sterilization, and 17 states do not have a law in place saying it is legal or illegal to forcefully sterilize disabled people (NWLC, 2022). So for the states that do not have a law allowing or banning forced sterilization, this means that if a case were potentially to be brought up in court, then it could be allowed to happen. For the states that allow the forced sterilization to happen, it usually is brought to court, and then the judge decides. In these instances, the case is typically brought to court by the guardian or a family member of the disabled person.
The case will go to court, and the family member or guardian will present the reasoning as to why they think that the disabled person should be sterilized, and in some cases, the judge does not even hear from the disabled person in the case (NWLC, 2022). One problem with these court cases is that often disabled people are not given sex education when they are in school. It could be due to the school just not giving it to them, or their parents/guardians could opt them out from receiving it. Then when these court cases come up, the disabled person, if they are even asked questions about wanting to be sterilized or not, do not have the knowledge to make an educated decision. The main argument now for why these forced sterilizations should occur go back to financial reasons. They think that if a disabled person has a child, they will not be able to take care of the child. This would potentially mean that it would become the government’s job to pay for the child. Another argument is that disabled people are not good decision makers, so this could also be endangering the child that they have.
There are not too many statistics about how often this is happening currently, because many of these cases are considered private, so people cannot just go and lookup how often this is happening, and who it is happening too (NWLC, 2022). There were some first-person accounts included in this article about the forced sterilization of disabled, and they were disturbing. In one instance, a girl’s mother asked for her to be sterilized, when she 15 years old. When the girl was about to receive the operation, the doctor told her it was for something else, and she did not realize that she was sterilized, until she tried to have a baby and was not able to do so. The other story they told was about a six-year-old girl, who received a hysterectomy, this prevented her from having periods of being able to get pregnant. In both instances, the people who were being forcefully sterilized were minors, under 18, and they had no say in the decision.
This is not always as cut and dry as it may seem. There are times medically when a disabled person might be deemed unable to give consent, but they may need the procedure to survive. In North Carolina, there was a minor with down syndrome and a minor intellectual disability, who could not give legal consent to get this procedure, but she needed it (Sowa, 2015). When she was having her menses, she was bleeding excessively. It was a pattern that had persisted, and the outlook for her was not great. So her guardian had to go to court to get permission to have this procedure done for her daughter. There was a possibility of death, so the court decided that this surgery was needed. The problem is when people try to loosen the idea that these surgeries are “needed”. In this case, it was life or death.
There were thousands of people that were sterilized in the U.S in the past, and many of the sterilizations were unnecessary, and sometimes the people were not even told what was happening. It would make sense that these people had received reparations from the U.S or the state where it occurred, but for the most part, this is not true. North Carolina was one of the only states to have a reparation program (Cohen, 2012). They have given their victims $50,000. When Charlie Follett was asked about if he had received reparations from California in 2012, he had not received any. His opinion was that California was waiting until all the victims were dead before they made their apology. Ten years later, California has just opened an application for reparations. This would be seventy years after Charlie was forcefully sterilized without an explanation and without being told what had happened. So it does seem like these reparations are coming too late for many.
The rights of disabled people have been placed on the backburner, and it has taken until recently to start to get disabled people the rights they deserve. One area in which their rights were swept under the rug is in the reproductive rights area, especially women, who have been the main victims of these procedures. Although these procedures do not occur as often as they used to, and the operations do not have the public backing that they used to have. There are cases when this is a medical necessity, but too often, guardians try to get these operations done, because they are worried about the added burden of a child, and in many cases the disabled people are not being given the knowledge about what is happening, and they do not have a say. Even with the shift of public opinion, the vast majority of states do not have laws preventing these operations, and the Supreme Court case that allowed these forced sterilizations to occur has not been overturned. More contemporary information about these cases is harder to find, and more research needs to be done in to how often these surgeries are happening currently, and what can be done to put more protections in place to stop the unnecessary ones from happening.
Works Cited:
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Cohen, E., & Bonifield, J. (2012, March 15). California's dark legacy of forced sterilizations. CNN.
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Epstein, C. (2015). Nazi Germany: Confronting the myths.
Lombardo, P. A. (1985). Three generations, no imbeciles: New light on Buck v. Bell. NYUL
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intellectual disability: a case report and historical perspective. North Carolina medical
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