How Far Does The Principle Underlying Vaccine Mandates Extend?
Posted by Edmund R. Folsom, Esq.
October 1, 2021
“Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony [for Epileptics and Feeble Minded] in due form. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child. She was eighteen years old at the time of the trial of her case in the Circuit Court in the latter part of 1924. An Act of Virginia approved March 20, 1924 (Laws 1924, c. 394) recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, etc.; that the sterilization may be effected in males by vasectomy and in females by salpingectomy, without serious pain or substantial danger to life; that the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who if now discharged would become a menace but if incapable of procreating might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting with benefit to themselves and to society; and that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, etc. The statute then enacts that whenever the superintendent of certain institutions including the abovenamed State Colony shall be of opinion that it is for the best interest of the patients and of society that an inmate under his care should be sexually sterilized, he may have the operation performed upon any patient afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity, imbecility, etc., on complying with the very careful provisions by which the act protects the patients from possible abuse.
….
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, 25 S. Ct. 358, 49 L. Ed. 643, 3 Ann. Cas. 765. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
So opined the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, under authorship of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). No U.S. Supreme Court case has ever expressly overruled Buck v. Bell, and no U.S. Supreme Court case has ever expressly overruled the compulsory vaccination case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, that Justice Holmes declared sets forth “[t]he principle that sustains compulsory vaccination…broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”
Achtung! Achtung!
That’s right – when people tell you that the constitutionality of vaccination mandates, including those imposed by the federal government through the regulatory agency OSHA, was settled by the Supreme Court in Jacobson, understand that the principle that sustains Jacobson is broad enough to cover the cutting of your fallopian tubes if the right authority figure considers you “feeble minded.”
And that’s progressivism unbound.
