For almost twenty years (1948 – 1966) the country that brought us Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, medical experiments on POWs and sex slaves had brutal eugenics laws.
Recently, it was reported by The Japanese Times that thousands of nonconsenting men, women, and children were sterilized.
A new parliamentary report from Japan has revealed that approximately 25,000 people were sterilized under the country’s former eugenics laws, the majority of whom did not consent. Some of the victims were children.
“Approximately 65% of the people sterilized were forced to undergo the procedures. Children as young as nine years old were among the victims, and many of them believed they were being treated for a legitimate illness.”
“People with intellectual disabilities, mental illness, or hereditary disorders were among those forcibly sterilized, as the Japanese government wanted to prevent the births of so-called ‘inferior’ children. Japanese politicians also wanted to cut population rates due to food shortages after World War II. Though the law ended in 1966, eugenic propaganda continued to spread long after; The Japan Times cited a high school textbook from the 1970s which said the government was working on the ‘country’s eugenics to improve and enhance the genetic predisposition of the entire public.’”
The United States of America had its own eugenics laws.
As I wrote in The “Living Constitution and the Right to Die (Amazon and other
publishers:
"The callous remark of Justice O.W. Holmes, Jr.— “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”— was made in his less than three-page majority (8–1) opinion in the 1927 United States Supreme Court case of Carrie Buck v. Bell, Superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded."
Immediately below are the relevant parts of Holmes’s opinion for the Court. [The italics, ellipses, and bracketed words are mine.]
Mr. Justice HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.
[T]he superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, was ordered to perform the operation of salpingectomy upon Carrie Buck … for the purpose of making her sterile. * * *
Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony…. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.
She was eighteen years old at the time of the trial of her case ….
An Act of Virginia … recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, etc.; that the sterilization may be effected in males by vasectomy and in females by salpingectomy, without serious pain or substantial danger to life; that the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who if now discharged would become a menace but if incapable of procreating might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting with benefit to themselves and to society; and that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, etc.
The statute then enacts that whenever the superintendent of certain institutions including the abovenamed State Colony shall be of opinion that it is for the best interest of the patients and of society that an inmate under his care should be sexually sterilized, he may have the operation performed upon any patient afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity, imbecility, etc., on complying with the very careful provisions by which the act protects the patients from possible abuse. [My emphasis.]
[A]ny party may apply to the [Virginia] Supreme Court of Appeals, which, if it grants the appeal, is to hear the case upon the record of the trial in the Circuit Court and may enter such order as it thinks the Circuit Court should have entered. There can be no doubt that so far as procedure is concerned the rights of the patient are most carefully considered, and as every step in this case was taken in scrupulous compliance with the statute and after months of observation, there is no doubt that in that respect the plaintiff has had due process.
Please note the following sentence’s dichotomy between procedu[ral] and substantive law, which, as we shall see, play a crucial role in why Americans have no constitutional right to die.
The [plaintiff’s] attack is not upon the [statute’s] procedure but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment [of the Virginia court] finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck “is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization . . . . * * * We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives [see In Memoriam and Selective Draft Law Cases, above. [Emphasis and bracketed words are mine.]
It would be strange if it [the public welfare] could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices … in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. 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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. [Emphasis and bracketed words are mine.]
Thus does Holmes’s opinion reek of a defense of eugenics. It has been estimated that as many as 70,000 Americans, men and women alike, were sterilized until 1944, most of them because of the widespread belief that eugenics was a solution to reduce reproduction of certain “undesirables.”
Buck v. Bell has never been overruled by the Supreme Court of the United States.
For additional information about Carrie Buck and Buck v. Bell, see Jennifer Senior’s March 6, 2016, New York Times review, Imbeciles on the Supreme Court and Justice Not for All by Adam Cohen. The following quotations are from Ms. Senior’s review. [Bracketed words are mine].
Ms. Buck was neither epileptic nor feebleminded. As time would prove, she was of perfectly average intelligence. She was simply uneducated and luckless—a poor white girl from
Charlottesville who’d had a baby at 17, most likely because she’d been raped by the nephew of her foster mother. Rather than risking scandal, her guardians thought it best to get rid of her.
Nor was Ms. Buck part of three generations of so-called imbeciles.
Of all the tools to stem the tide of feeblemindedness, sterilization was by far the most efficient. During the Progressive Era, a number of states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws, including California and Connecticut. So bullish was Dr. Priddy to do the same for Virginia that he worked in concert with a methodical, meticulous local lawmaker, Aubrey Strode, to design a statute that would withstand the test of the highest court of the land. Ms. Buck was the test case.
We learn early on that Ms. Buck’s lawyer, Irving Whitehead, had close personal and professional ties to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded—the superintendent paid his legal fees—which meant he [the lawyer] made no efforts to mount a serious defense for his client.
Justice Holmes [was] himself an eager eugenicist, as were a few of his Supreme Court colleagues.
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So too are many of today’s politicians, academics, teachers, physicians, writers, and others who yield coercive power.
