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
      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.