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.

TORONTO (AP) — 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.

  • MicroWave@lemmy.worldOP
    23·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • MicroWave@lemmy.worldOP
        27·
        1 year ago

        There are more horrific accounts in the article that can’t be summarized into something short, but here’s another:

        Dr. Alika Lafontaine, the first Indigenous president of the Canadian Medical Association, recalls times in his own training when it was unclear whether Indigenous women had agreed to sterilization.

        “In my residency, there were situations where we would do C-sections on patients and someone would lean over and say, ‘So we’ll also clip her (fallopian) tubes,’” he said. “It never crossed my mind whether these patients had an informed conversation” about sterilization, he said, adding he assumed that had happened before patients were on the operating table.

        So messed up.