Buck v. Bell

Sorry this is a little late, I got back from the airport a little late. My girlfriend's plane was delayed because the Pope was leaving from Newark where she was going.
My group looked at a strange ethical lapse. It is something that we would think could only happen in another country like Germany during the Nazi regime, but under the surface the US isn't always as clean as we'd like to think. I read a book about totalitarian states in one of my history classes, and I remember reading about how the Nazis sterilized all those that they deemed to be unfit for society. Some of the methods of sterilization were pretty gruesome, and I aways associated forced sterilization with some evil government. Then I read about the tests done on African American males with syphilis and I realized that we are just better at hiding our crimes. We looked at a supreme court case called Buck v. Bell which dealt with eugenic sterilization. This 1927 case upheld compulsory sterilization of the mentally handicapped for the health of the state. I couldn't believe the language that was used by the supreme court justices when describing these people. They used extremely dehumanizing language. They treated them like subhumans and this is very scary considering that was the Supreme Court of the US.