The app for independent voices
For those that think involuntary depopulation and violent state sponsored eugenics operations are just outlandish conspiracy theories or some thing from “the distant past”:
In Canada, between 1966 and 1976, over 10,000 indigenous women underwent forcible sterilisation in public hospitals, residential schools, and mental facilities.
Indigenous women in Canada were being forcibly sterilized by state sponsored eugenics operations as recently as 2019. A report last year concluded “this horrific practice is not confined to the past, but clearly is continuing today.” In May of 2023, a doctor was caught forcibly sterilizing an Indigenous woman.
The growing enthusiasm for eugenics thinking reached Canadian borders in the first half of the 20th century. Even though forced sterilisation was already common throughout the territory, the Province of Alberta officially enacted the Sexual Sterilization Act (SSA) in 1928, followed in 1933 by British Columbia. Considered the first Canadian eugenics law, this act legalised and regulated the sterilisation of mentally-disabled individuals.
Aggressive assimilation policies quickly extended these measures to Indigenous communities such as the Inuit, Indian, and Métis people. While it is difficult to provide an accurate estimate, researchers agree that Indigenous women were disproportionately targeted. Between 1966 and 1976, over 10,000 women would have undergone forced sterilisation in public hospitals, residential schools, and mental facilities. And It has continued since then in more subtle and nefarious ways.
In 2021, Canada drew international scrutiny for denouncing inhumane treatment of the Uyghur community. Together with the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, it imposed a set of sanctions against several Chinese state officials to denounce China’s ongoing genocide. Expressing its bewilderment in the face of “horrific reports of human rights violations,” Justin Trudeau’s government came on particularly strong about the use of forced sterilisation in an attempt to limit the growth of the Muslim population in Xinjiang.
In international law, forced sterilisation is defined as “the involuntary or coerced removal of a person’s ability to reproduce” and this without “free, prior, full and informed consent”. Often part of government-mandated programs, this birth control method aims at preventing a specific group of people from having access to reproductive choices, making it a prime example of state violence and systemic racism. Recent developments in regional and international courts have resulted in the global recognition of forced sterilisation as a grave violation under international human rights law. The Rome Statute, for instance, considers forced sterilisation a war crime and a crime against humanity.
Despite SSA’s (Sexual Sterilization Act) official repeal in 1973, the recent period has witnessed a rise in reproductive abuses. In 2018, a class-action lawsuit representing 60 women was filed against the Saskatchewan government. The suit presented alleged violations of rights as recently as 2017, and testimonies reported forced tubal ligation procedures and hysterectomies realised under the pressure of medical personnel. Since then, over 1000 Indigenous women have come forward with similar statements across the country.
Last November, a report documented nearly two dozen forced sterilizations in Quebec from 1980 to 2019, including one woman who said her doctor told her after bladder surgery that he had removed her uterus at the same time — without her consent.
The report concluded that doctors and nurses “insistently questioning whether a First Nations or Inuit mother wants to (be sterilized) after the birth of her first child seems to be an existing practice in Quebec.”
Some women were not even aware they were sterilized.
Morningstar Mercredi, an Alberta-based Indigenous author, was sterilized as a 14-year-old, but didn’t find out until decades later when she sought help after being unable to conceive.
There are at least 7 class-action lawsuits against health, provincial and federal authorities involving forced sterilizations in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario and elsewhere currently (but good luck getting the corrupt court system to hold the government and these psychotic racist doctors accountable).
