The 1927 Supreme Court ruling that allowed Carrie Buck to be forcibly sterilized gave every state the green light to continue or begin sterilizing those deemed unfit to produce children, all in the name of “race betterment.” Over the next five decades more than sixty thousand men and women in thirty states were forcibly sterilized. And while these sterilizations diminished somewhat after eugenic ideology at its worst was exposed in the liberated concentration camps of Nazi Germany, the practice continued in some states for decades afterward. Many states had eugenics laws in place until the
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