This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

And I'm Holly Fry.

I've been thinking about terrible U.S. Supreme Court decisions for some reason.

Gosh, I can't imagine why.

Well, I mean, if you're imagining that the reason is because of that request to have the Supreme Court overturn Obergefell,

that's not the reason because that happened after I emailed you this outline.

Yeah.

Like three hours later were all the headlines about the Supreme Court being asked to overturn Obergefell.

I had been thinking about that conceptually.

I had been more thinking about birthright citizenship.

Anyway, just I've been thinking a lot about the Supreme Court. And that reminded me that for a long

time I've wanted to do an episode on Buck v. Bell, which has come up in past episodes of our

show related to the eugenics movement,

Buck v. Bell is the 1927 Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of laws

allowing or mandating the involuntary sterilization of people who were deemed to be somehow unfit.

We've talked about the existence of this case and the outcome before,

but we have not really talked about the details of what led up to it.

Most of these sterilization laws that this relates to have been repealed in the U.S., but Buck v. Bell has never been

directly overturned. There's like a patchwork of other decisions and legal lines of reasoning

that kind of undermine it today, but the decision itself still stands. And at the same time,

...