Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice hopes to of chronicle the history of First Nation, Inuit and Metis women and girls being forcefully sterilized and getting a better idea of how many people it affected.
Toronto Star: newly-formed group is launching a national registry of Indigenous Peoples who were forced or coerced into sterilization, and is encouraging survivors to come forward.
The group, called the Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice, formed in Ottawa on Oct. 10 and officially launched the registry on Friday, in hopes of chronicling the history of First Nation, Inuit and Métis women and girls being forcefully sterilized and getting a better idea of how many people it affected.
Harmony Redsky, the group’s executive director, said it’s estimated that at least 15,000 Indigenous women and girls were pressured, coerced or forced to undergo tubal ligation since at least the 1890s, although better data is needed because many survivors have not told their story.
“This is part of the terrible legacy of colonization in Canada … if you look at world history and forced sterilization in other countries, you can see it emerging in basically every part of the world,” Redsky said. “But it in the 1920s and 1930s primarily, it started to show up in the records of residential schools.”
Forced sterilization was “common practice” at some residential schools and Indian hospitals in that era, but it also occurred in the child welfare and correctional systems, Redsky said.
The practice was first passed into law in Alberta in 1928 under Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act, which arose from the eugenics movement. British Columbia followed suit five years later, and the provinces didn’t repeal the laws until the 1970s.
According to a study in the National Library of Medicine, the practice was targeted at preventing people with “serious mental disease or mental deficiency” from reproducing, but it disproportionally affected Indigenous Peoples.
Alberta and British Columbia are the only provinces that passed laws sanctioning forced sterilization, but the practice occurred nationwide, according to the study, which cites a 2017 class-action lawsuit where more than 100 women across Canada reported being forcefully or coercively sterilized.
While forced sterilization is often seen as a historical injustice, it’s still happening, Redsky said. At least five class-action lawsuits say the practice has not ended in Canada, according to an Associated Press article pointing to a 2019 incident where a Northwest Territories doctor was penalized for forcibly sterilizing an Indigenous woman.
“It’s horrifying to learn that these things happened in Canada and have not been acknowledged … and are still happening,” Redsky said.
In 2022, Sen. Yvonne Boyer introduced a bill to amend the criminal code to outlaw sterilization procedures. It recently received a third reading in the Senate, but has yet to make it to the House of Commons.
Survivors who want to enter the registry are asked to contact the Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice at www.reproductivejusticesurvivors.ca.
By Omar Mosleh, Staff Reporter
Omar Mosleh is an Toronto-based reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @OmarMosleh.