La bouche by Jean-Baptiste Miette

Last year, investigative reporters revealed that in Nashville, Tennessee, between 2010 and 2015, prosecutors had used sterilization as a bargaining chip in plea deals with female defendants. One of them was Jasmine Randers, who had a long history of depression, paranoia, and schizoaffective disorder. When her infant daughter died of mysterious causes in 2012, Randers was charged with child neglect. The prosecutor assigned to the case would not agree to a plea deal that avoided prison time unless Randers underwent sterilization surgery. Randers’s defense attorney complained, the prosecutor was taken off the case and later fired, and Randers was declared not guilty by reason of insanity. But coerced sterilizations do still occur: A 2013 report from the Center for Investigative Reporting found that in California between the late 1990s and 2010, hundreds of female prisoners were sterilized without proper state approval. As a result of the investigation, Governor Jerry Brown signed a law banning forced sterilizations in the California prison system.

Such a law was necessary because, in the twenty-first century, according to the United States Supreme Court, it is perfectly legal for a state to require a woman to be sterilized—the result of a nearly 90-year-old judgment in a case that remains on the books, Buck v. Bell. That case is the subject of an important new book by the journalist Adam Cohen, Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, which details the eugenic horror that still haunts the American legal system.

It was the quiet work of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian botanist and monk who conducted experiments in the garden of his monastery in the 1850s and 1860s, that helped trigger the eugenic revolution in early twentieth-century America. Mendel discovered that when a green pea is crossed with a yellow pea, the resulting offspring are yellow—the “dominant” genetic trait—yet in the second generation, Mendel found, the “recessive” gene reappears, and a quarter of the offspring will be green. His work traced the genetic origins of hereditary characteristics and explained the mechanism through which farmers, for thousands of years, had selectively bred their crops.

Mendel died in 1884, virtually unknown. His paper “Experiments on Plant Hybrids” had been published but hardly noticed by the scientific community. Mendel’s research found a new audience at the turn of the twentieth century, promoted by English “social Darwinists” who hoped to apply theories of natural selection to humankind. American progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger were inspired by social Darwinism and became gripped by a fervor for eugenics, a pseudoscience that considered human poverty, criminality, disability, and sexual promiscuity to be heritable traits, as immutable as pea color. If the “unfit and undesirable” could be prevented from breeding, eugenists believed, the human race could be remade within several generations, mentally and morally pure.

IMBECILES: THE SUPREME COURT, AMERICAN EUGENICS, AND THE STERILIZATION OF CARRIE BUCK by Adam Cohen Penguin, 402 pp., $28

Middle-class women’s clubs, the American Museum of Natural History, and even the U.S. State Department hosted lectures on eugenics. Over 300 American colleges, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and Berkeley, offered classes on the subject. Cosmopolitan magazine enthused about the promise of preventing the birth of the “diseased or crippled or depraved,” and the Journal of the American Medical Association published articles in favor of eugenic sterilization. In the first decade of the twentieth century, state legislatures began considering laws that would allow certain people to be sterilized against their will.