THE STERILIZATION OF CARRIE BUCK. by Smith, J.David and K. Ray Nelson - (1989)

New York:: New Horizon Press,, (1989). Good only in a very good dust jacket (a straight, tight copy but with extensive pencilled marginal notations and some underlining) . First printing. "Was She Feebleminded or Society's Pawn?" An account of notorious case used to justify the sterilization of women, and a look at the life of Carrie Buck, a teenaged victim of rape in the house where she was a "ward", was institutionalized in Virginia, sterilized, and released as a source of cheap, domestic labor primarily because she was young, poor, and powerless. At the Supreme Court in 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes decided that "three generations of imbeciles" were "enough" to determine the constitutionality of sterilizing imbeciles, a decision later used by the Nazis to justify their racial exterminations as well as over 50,000 sterilizations in America without due process or consent. Photographs. Bibliography. xviii, 268 pp.