The details of Buck v. Bell case are pretty much a fractal of infuriating.
1. The entire reason Carrie Buck was institutionalized was not that she was actually "feeble-minded", but that she had been raped by her foster parents' nephew and they wanted to make sure she was silenced. Note that the only "evidence" offered for her feeble-mindedness was her supposed "promiscuity" and "incorrigibleness", i.e., her being raped.
2. Justice Holmes' infamous comment about "three generations of imbeciles are enough" was based on outright perjury; the prosecution falsely claimed that Buck's mother and daughter were also feeble minded. There is no evidence that her mother was actually unintelligent; she had been institutionalized, true, but this was for alleged "immorality, prostitution, and syphilis". There is positive evidence that her daughter Vivian was in fact of perfectly normal, even above average intelligence; she had even made the honor roll, and only one of her grades was ever below "C" in an era where C was considered a solid pass grade. SCOTUS, however, accepted without evidence the prosecution's allegations because the defense did not contest them.
3. And why didn't the defense contest them? Because the entire lawsuit was literally a staged production by the superintendent of the institution Buck had been placed at, who was militantly pro-eugenics and wanted to concoct a test case that would legally justify it; he arranged for two co-conspirators, both of which were close friends of his and *also* militant eugenicists, to represent the institute as plaintiff and Buck as defense. In other words, her defense was actively conspiring against her in a stage-managed show trial.
4. The final piece of evidence that Carrie Buck was in no way feeble-minded? Well, once the trial was over and she'd been forcibly sterilized, the conspirators had no further use for her and she'd been even more thoroughly discredited than her foster parents and their rapist nephew could ever have imagined. . . so she was released from the institute, and proceeded to demonstrate that she was and always had been perfectly capable of being a completely normal member of society.
5. Unlike other "now widely considered horrible" Supreme Court precedents, Buck v. Bell was never overturned and remains the law of the land to this day. In fact, the only even partially countervailing precedent was a later SCOTUS case where the court ruled that states could not impose involuntary sterilization as a criminal penalty for blue-collar crimes unless they also imposed on comparable white-collar crimes. The shift away from eugenics has been driven entirely by fading popularity, and every state retains full authority and Constitutional approval to re-implement mandatory eugenics programs whenever it wants.
Thanks for this information. That case and its facts were just awful. Mandatory eugenics is obviously evil, but do you consider it a bad thing for a country's government to, say, pay its STEM university graduates and STEM workers to have children (or to have more children, if they already have children)?