Canada’s Indigenous women forcibly sterilized decades after other rich countries stopped
TORONTO — Decades after many other rich countries stopped forcibly sterilizing Indigenous women, numerous activists, doctors, politicians and at least five class-action lawsuits say 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 penalized for forcibly sterilizing 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 a type of genocide.
There are no solid estimates on how many women are still being sterilized against their will or without their knowledge, but Indigenous experts say they regularly hear complaints about it. Sen. 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 sterilization happened to them,” Boyer, who has Indigenous Metis heritage, told The Associated Press.
Medical authorities in Canada’s Northwest Territories issued a series of punishments in May in what may be the first time a doctor has been sanctioned for forcibly sterilizing an Indigenous woman, according to documents obtained by the AP.
The case involves Dr. Andrew Kotaska, who performed an operation to relieve an Indigenous woman’s abdominal pain in November 2019. He had her written consent to remove her right fallopian tube, but the patient, an Inuit woman, had not agreed to the removal of her left tube; losing both 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 sterilization, 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 sterilized, in line with eugenics legislation that deemed them inferior. In the U.S., forced sterilizations of Native American women mostly ended in the 1970s after new regulations were adopted requiring informed consent.
The Geneva Conventions describe forced sterilization as a type of genocide and crime against humanity and the Canadian government has condemned reports of forced sterilization elsewhere, including among Uyghur women in China.
In 2018, the U.N. Committee Against Torture told Canada it was concerned about persistent reports of forced sterilization, saying all allegations should be investigated and those found responsible held accountable.
