Canada’s Indigenous women forcibly sterilised
Toronto, July 12: Decades after many other rich countries stopped forcibly sterilising Indigenous women, numerous activists, doctors, politicians and at least five class-action lawsuits allege the practice has not ended in Canada.
A Senate report last year concluded “this horrific practice is not confined to the past, but clearly is continuing today”. In May, a doctor was penalised for forcibly sterilising an Indigenous woman in 2019.
Indigenous leaders say the country has yet to fully reckon with its troubled colonial past – or put a stop to a decades-long practice that is considered genocide.
There are no solid estimates on how many women are being sterilised against their will, but Indigenous experts say they regularly hear complaints about it. Senator Yvonne Boyer, whose office is collecting the limited data available, says at least 12,000 women have been affected since the 1970s.
“Whenever I speak to an Indigenous community, I am swamped with women telling me that forced sterilisation happened to them,” Boyer, who has Indigenous Metis heritage, told The Associated Press.
Medical authorities in Canada’s Northwest Territories sanctioned a doctor in May for forcibly sterilising an Indigenous woman, according to documents obtained by the AP.
Dr Andrew Kotaska performed the 2019 operation to relieve an Indigenous woman’s abdominal pain. He had her written consent to remove her right fallopian tube but not her left one, which would leave her sterile.
Despite objections from other medical staff during the surgery, Kotaska took out both fallopian tubes.
The investigation concluded there was no medical justification for the sterilisation, and Kotaska was found to have engaged in unprofessional conduct. Kotaska’s “severe error in surgical judgment” was unethical, cost the patient the chance to have more children and could undermine trust in the medical system, investigators said.
The case was likely not exceptional.
Thousands of Indigenous Canadian women over the past seven decades were coercively sterilised, in line with eugenics legislation that deemed them inferior.
The Geneva Conventions describe forced sterilisation as a type of genocide and crime against humanity and the Canadian government has condemned forced sterilisation elsewhere, including of Uyghur women in China.
In 2018, the UN Committee Against Torture told Canada it was concerned about persistent reports of forced sterilization, saying all allegations should be investigated. (AP)
