A century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that legal scholars generally consider to be among the worst in its history. In the landmark case, Buck v. Bell, the court affirmed that states had the right to forcibly sterilize โfeebleminded and socially inadequateโ people to prevent them from having children.
The decision bolstered Americaโs burgeoning eugenics movement, which proclaimed to improve humanity through selective breeding.
โMost people think that eugenics is something from the distant past, but it has come back into the public conversation in a big way in the last 30 years,โ says [Paul] Lombardo, Regentsโ Professor and Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law.
In the 1990s, two major events prompted this conversation to reemerge. One was the commencement of the Human Genome Project, which aimed to map the complete set of human genes. By the late 1990s, this project was beginning to reach its milestones and raising a lot of questions about the ethics of genetic testing and genetic engineering.
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We will continue to see these questions raised as new technologies emerge, whether itโs prenatal genetic testing orย CRISPR gene editing. There will continue to be, and there should be, conversations about the potential benefits and drawbacks, such as how the use of technologies could lead to a devaluing of certain people.
