generalspeaking

Canada: Aboriginal Women, Forced Sterilization

"Do you want them cut or burned?"
"I said, 'I don't know, what am I supposed to do? Just burn'."
"We need to have the women believe and have faith that we are not speaking this and sharing this to the wind -- that this is going to go somewhere, that this will change a life."
Deb Ironbow, Saskatoon

"I think a lot of these [Aboriginal] women thought they were alone and I think the reporting on it [coerced sterilization] and the investigation into it [morally unacceptable medical practise] really makes this country safer for almost immunizing [sic] women at the time of their greatest vulnerability."
Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett, former physician

"If that [a clear action plan] is not part of the [government's action plan, then I worry about the whole guardian and ward process being implemented to address these problems and that would be the bureaucracy saying what's best or determining what's best for Indigenous women."
"If it's happened in Saskatoon, it has happened in Regina, it's happened in Winnipeg, it's happened where there's a high population of Indigenous women. I've had many women contact me from across the country and ask me for help."
Senator Yvonne Boyer, Metis lawyer

Tubal ligations carried out on unwilling Indigenous women are among the 'most heinous' practices in health care happening across Canada, says Yvonne Boyer, a Metis lawyer and former nurse who is now a senator for Ontario. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

An estimated hundred Aboriginal women have spoken publicly reporting they have been forcibly sterilized. A Saskatchewan law firm is now leading a proposed class action lawsuit against the Saskatoon Health Region. Senator Boyer's external review of the situation published in 2017 on the issue of Indigenous women coerced into tubal ligations after childbirth -- where the severing, burning or tying of the Fallopian tubes carrying eggs from the ovaries to the uterus -- would ensure they could no longer bear children first emerged, appeared to spur affected women to come forward.

That public airing in turn influenced Indigenous Services Minister Jane Philpott and Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor to send letters to the provinces, territories and medical communities serving them,  highlighting "recent reports with troubling information" with respect to Indigenous women reporting sterilization procedures taking place immediately following childbirth which failed to seek their consent. Deb Ironbow was briefly questioned the method she would prefer done, while she was undergoing a C-section.

Decades on, she is questioning why it was that she was asked about a "life-destroying act" at the very moment she was being operated on for a Caesarean section. She professes to having no confidence whatever in the working group tasked to examine the issue put into place by the Trudeau government.  The coerced sterilization of First Nations women by medical practitioners represents a victimization of women unaware of what was being done to them, while they were in a vulnerable position.

Nowhere does the story state any kind of potentially exonerating circumstances; that the women had a record of drug and/or alcohol abuse, giving birth serially to children suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome from their mothers' addictions, or women bearing a succession of children whom they neglect or abuse necessitating that the children be placed in protective custody. Even in such cases due process must be taken, with the mothers given every opportunity to seek counselling and reform much less their permission to proceed with sterilization.

The government seemed to take notice of the situation when the United Nations Committee Against Torture ordered Canada to bring a halt to the "extensive forced or coerced sterilization" of Indigenous women and girls, sparking calls for federal action by human-rights groups within Canada. The allegations of human rights abuses; recent situations in Saskatchewan and others taking place elsewhere in Canada must be held to account.

Former family physician Carolyn Bennett, now Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations stated that the medical community has been placed on official notice that such coerced sterilization is utterly unacceptable, that querying women during active labour how they would prefer to be sterilized does not signify consent.

"There may be more reporting that they were sterilized without proper and informed consent, against their will, in Winnipeg." 
"I think that the problem is quite a bit larger than we know it to be. And I think that it's quite a bit larger than we may, perhaps, ever know it to be, because not all women will come out and say that this happened to them."
"We want to stop this from happening. Before you can really mend a wound, before you can heal, you have to ensure that the offence is no longer occurring."
"Or that at least preventative measures are put into place to ensure that its likelihood is extremely diminished."
Alisa Lombard, lawyer with Maurice Law, involved in class action suit 

Labels: Aboriginal Women, Canada, Class Action, Forced Sterilization, Human Rights

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, December 19, 2018