Decades after other countries stopped forcibly sterilizing Indigenous women, numerous activists, doctors, politicians and at least five class-action lawsuits allege the practice has not ended in Canada.
May Sarah Cardinal sits for a portrait outside the Law Courts building in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on Thursday, May 25, 2023. Cardinal said she was pressured into having her tubes tied when she was 20. “The doctor told me: ‘There are hard times ahead and how are you going to look after a bunch of kids? What if your husband leaves?' ... I was afraid if I didn’t go through with it, they would be angry with me, and I didn’t feel like I had a say.
There are no solid estimates on how many women are being sterilized against their will, 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. 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.Thousands of Indigenous Canadian women over the past seven decades were coercively sterilized, in line with eugenics legislation that deemed them inferior.
In a statement, the Canadian government told the AP it was aware of allegations that Indigenous women were forcibly sterilized and the matter is before the courts. In 2019, Sylvia Tuckanow told the Senate committee investigating forced sterilizations about how she gave birth in a Saskatoon hospital in July 2001. She described being disoriented from medication and being tied to a bed as she cried.
“I went into a catatonic stage and had a nervous breakdown,” Mercredi wrote in her 2021 book, “Sacred Bundles Unborn.” Last year, the government allocated 6.2 million Canadian dollars to help survivors of forced sterilization.Dr. Alika Lafontaine, the first Indigenous president of the Canadian Medical Association, recalls times when it was unclear whether Indigenous women had agreed to sterilization.
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