If the goal was to actually segregate disabled people from public life, you could say the colony model succeeded. As Michael Rembis, associate professor and director of the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo, wrote in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, the physicians, social workers, and state officials who ran colonies and other institutions for disabled individuals were “driven by an ableist logic that was always infused with racialist, gendered, and class-based thinking” in their attempts at “segregating, sterilizing, and generally restricting the world’s disabled population.”
Colonies also assured that disabled people would be shielded from public view, similar to the 19th- and 20th-century “Ugly Laws” that made it illegal to exist in public spaces as a person with a visible disability.
In the early 20th century, epileptic and feebleminded colonies became hotbeds for eugenics. In 1924, a teenage girl named Carrie Buck was institutionalized at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded after becoming pregnant outside of marriage. In part because Carrie’s birth mother had also been institutionalized, the medical superintendent of the Virginia State Colony sought to have her sterilized — so she wouldn’t pass down her alleged mental defect to any additional children.
The resulting court case, Buck v. Bell, went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote for the majority, declared in reference to Carrie, her birth mother, and Carrie’s daughter that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” In the end, Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will. Buck v. Bell was never overturned, and 31 states still allow the forced sterilization of disabled people, according to a 2022 report from the National Women’s Law Center.
Across the country, up to 70,000 forced sterilizations took place throughout the 20th century, per NPR, with many of them occurring in colonies and other institutions. Rather than focusing on curing patients, colonies became about control: control over who got to live in communities and who didn’t, and control over who would have the opportunity to have children.
RFK Jr.’s fixation on wellness farms also risks stripping disabled Americans of the right to choose how they live their own lives. In 1999, the US Supreme Court declared that disabled Americans have the right to live and receive support in their communities when medically appropriate, rather than be forced into state-run institutions.
Although RFK Jr. maintains that admission to his wellness farms would be voluntary, the Trump administration has essentially labeled people with disabilities, chronic health conditions, and neurodivergence — as well as the essential medications on which many of them rely — a threat to national security. This language makes it clear that disabled people are not welcome in this new “Make America Healthy Again” era.
Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t be surprising that under the “Make America Healthy Again” mantra we are seeing a resurgence of eugenecist talking points and attempts by lawmakers to strip back disabled people’s rights. Last month, as The Guardian reported, a University of Texas at Austin-owned venue hosted a natalism conference featuring a number of controversial far-right and eugenics-aligned speakers who promote high birth rates.
