About once a week my search for “Today in History” turns up a reminder, positive or negative, of something that pro-lifers should carefully ponder. Ninety one years ago today, in Buck v. Bell, the United States Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law that allowed the forced sterilization of people to promote the “health of the patient and the welfare of society.” Specifically, the 8-1 decision, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes permitted an innocent woman by the name of Carrie Buck to be involuntarily sterilized. Carrie Buck’s “crime”? She was supposedly “feeble-minded.” As Social Darwinist Justice Holmes pronounced, in one...
