Carrie and Emma Buck

Carrie Buck is pictured here with her mother, Emma, at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in Lynchburg in 1924. Carrie Buck was the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court case that affirmed the constitutionality of a 1924 Virginia law empowering the commonwealth to sterilize individuals deemed genetically unfit. The "principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in the majority opinion, therby authorizing Carrie Buck's sterilization and creating a precedent for tens of thousands of forced sterilizations in the United States between 1927 and the 1970s.