In 1927, a young woman named Carrie Buck lived at a place called “the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded.” Carrie was 17 years old and had been born with a disability that led the superintendent of the “Colony,” Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, to estimate that she operated at the mental level of an 8-year-old. Carrie’s mother had been diagnosed with the same intellectual disability, as had her grandmother.
Dr. Priddy believed that by existing and procreating, Carrie posed a genetic threat to society. He filed a petition with his board of directors to have to her forcibly sterilized.
Dr. Priddy’s petition reached the U.S. Supreme Court in the famous case Buck v. Bell, wherein Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in upholding the forced sterilization, wrote the now-infamous phrase, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
This week, CBS News ran a report about Iceland, referring to it as “the country where Down Syndrome is disappearing.”
“With the rise of prenatal screening tests across Europe and the United states, the number of babies born with Down syndrome has significantly decreased,” the article buoyantly begins, “but few countries have come as close to eradicating Down syndrome births as Iceland.”
The report goes on to say that since screening tests were introduced in the early 2000s, close to 100 percent of pregnancies that tested positive for Down syndrome were terminated. In the U.S., the termination rate is 67 percent.
The termination of these gene pool threats also known as babies was celebrated by many across social media after the release of the report.
After all, the eradication of a genetic defect – or, more correctly, the unborn babies who tested positive for the defect – is better for the rest of us, right?
But to those of us with Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous phrase ringing in our ears, it brought a haunting chill.
Calling Carrie “the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring,” Holmes went on to say in his decision that those who would “sap the strength of the state” must sacrifice to prevent our society being “swamped in with incompetence.”
“It is better for all the world,” Holmes wrote, “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.”
Ah yes.
It is better for the world if we eradicate the weak. We owe nothing to the one little life, only to the wider pursuit of a more healthy and pristine race. In our Darwinian torrent to grow strong, let us celebrate the elimination of nearly 100 percent of these tiny human lives.
I can’t speak to why each of those families made the decisions they did about their pregnancies.
I can only say that I know many beautiful, strong and happy people for whom Down syndrome has been a diagnosis, but not a death sentence. That 90 years after the test case for Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization Act, I cannot believe we are specifically eradicating human lives because of disabilities.
And that to applaud a nearly 100-percent “elimination rate” is a slippery slope worthy of the treacherous mountains of Iceland, and Oliver Wendell Holmes would approve.