Since the 1970s, thousands of indigenous women in Canada have been sterilized against their will – an injustice that still occurs today. Now several class action lawsuits are putting the government under pressure.
The white doctor’s words are burned into Liz’s mind, who doesn’t want her name published: “It’s better if you agree to the abortion. Because we’re going to take this baby away from you. One way or another.” The then 17-year-old Canadian from the indigenous Anishinabe people did not dare to contradict her.
At the end of the 1970s, she sits frightened in the treatment room of the “Indian Clinic” in the province of Ontario, a clinic where indigenous people are treated so that they can adapt to so-called civilization. There they made a judgment about Liz: the single mother was not able to care for another child. The doctor therefore wants to tie her fallopian tubes and thereby sterilize her.
Liz remembers how the doctor explained to her what he was going to do and, under pressure, she complied, even though she didn’t understand what was happening to her. It was only years later that she realized: she was not alone. Tens of thousands of Indigenous women in Canada have been sterilized against their will under eugenics legislation since the 1920s.
And even though these laws no longer exist, it still happens today, says Senator Yvonne Boyer in Congress in Ottawa, who herself belongs to the Métis ethnic group: “It’s history and it continues to happen.”
As a senator, Yvonne Boyer fights for the rights of indigenous women who have been forced to undergo sterilization.
Shame turns into silence
She receives emails and calls every day in which women tell her about forced sterilizations. Ontario’s first Indigenous senator says at least 12,000 women have been sterilized against their will since the 1970s.
“Many women are forced into this before they have even had a baby”, she knows. “Social workers and medical professionals decide whether or not they are able to care for a baby.” The former nurse has had years of experience with racism in the Canadian healthcare system. She became a lawyer in order to change something and soon initiated the first investigations.
Alarmed UN human rights monitors called in 2018 for all allegations to be investigated. The Geneva Conventions classify forced sterilization as a crime against humanity. As a form of genocide. A Senate report will be produced in 2022 under Boyer’s leadership. Liz also testified at the hearing.
The recording blares tinny from her cell phone on the kitchen table in her trailer in Fort William First Nation. The reserve where Liz is a community worker is nestled among forests around the shores of Lake Superior in Thunder Bay. When she hears her own statement again, Liz breathes heavily. She didn’t talk about her story often. Not even with her daughter Jennifer, who she had at the age of 16 and who is now a mother herself. For a long time, Jennifer had no idea what was happening to her mother. “I was ashamed,” says Liz.
Liz still finds it difficult to talk about her forced sterilization.
Fallopian tubes severed and obliterated
Sylvia Tuckanow also speaks in the Senate hearing. At the age of 29, she was sterilized against her will. She had given birth to a son in a clinic in Saskatoon. Immediately afterwards she was prepared for an operation and secured to a table. “I cried and was terrified. I hyperventilated in this position: my head lower than my body,” she describes. Sylvia smelled burning flesh. Then she heard the doctor say: “Like this: strangled, severed and destroyed. Nothing can get through.” He was talking about her fallopian tubes. After the hearing, many more women broke their silence.
Senator Boyer’s mission is to solve such cases of forced sterilization and to stop them once and for all. And to compensate the victims. The road there will be long, she knows: forced sterilization is still not an offense in the Canadian criminal code. “The law would be a tool,” says the senator. “It wouldn’t cure anything. But it would be a deterrent. People might think twice about sterilizing a woman against her will if they could end up in prison for 14 years.”
Last year, a doctor in the Northwest Territories was punished for rendering an Inuit woman infertile against her will in 2019. He lost his license – for five months.
Women lack trust in the system
The Senate committee calls for a national body to investigate across the country. Investigations only take place in a fraction of cases, even though five percent of the almost 40 million Canadians belong to indigenous communities. “For example, we haven’t been to the north yet. We know: 26 percent of the women in Igloolik were sterilized. They took them to the south on ships, carried out mass sterilizations and brought them back,” says Boyer. “But we need accurate data.”
At least five class action lawsuits are ongoing in different provinces. The women are suing the doctors, but also the Canadian government. It has now made millions of dollars available to support victims of forced sterilizations. Also money to ensure indigenous women have access to better health care. For example, about traditional midwifery initiatives.
Women need trust in the health system again, says Lynne Groulx. She heads the country’s largest indigenous women’s organization, the Native Women’s Association of Canada. “It took hundreds of years to get where we are now. And perhaps it will take just as long for attitudes to change,” she says. “We have to start with education and upbringing so that our children can overcome this systemic discrimination.”
Antje Passenheim, ARD New York, tagesschau, March 6, 2024 3:52 p.m