According to a report, Canadian Indigenous women are still under pressure to have their fallopian tubes tied decades after other developed nations outlawed the abhorrent practice.
The practice of forcibly sterilizing Indigenous women in Canada has not ended, according to a significant number of activists, doctors, politicians, and at least five class-action lawsuits, The Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
In a report published last year, the Canadian Senate stated that Indigenous women are still sterilized without their knowledge or consent, and came to the shocking conclusion that “this horrific practice is not confined to the past, but clearly is continuing today.”
A doctor was disciplined back in May for performing an illegal procedure on an Indigenous woman in 2019, the report continued, citing obtained documents.
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According to eugenics legislation that deemed them inferior, thousands of Indigenous Canadian women over the course of the previous 70 years were coercively sterilized, the report said.
Indigenous leaders claim that Ottawa has done little to nothing to stop the violations and that Canada still has not fully accepted the consequences of its troubled colonial past.
Nearly 5% of the population of Canada is made up of 11.7 million Indigenous people, the majority of whom reside in rural areas where suicide, high unemployment, and poverty are persistent issues.
Boyer, who is of Indigenous Metis heritage, said, “I am swamped with women telling me that forced sterilization happened to them whenever I speak to an Indigenous community.”
The Geneva Conventions define forced sterilization as a form of genocide and a crime against humanity.
While doing so, Canada condemned forced sterilization in other parts of the world.
The Canadian government responded to the AP’s inquiry about the matter by stating that “sterilization of women without their informed consent constitutes an assault and is a criminal offense. “.
Additionally, it was acknowledged that Indigenous people “continue to suffer catastrophic effects” as a result of bias in the health system.
Some Indigenous Peoples’ human rights organizations have long criticized Canada for persistently violating the rights of Aboriginal women to life, freedom, and security.
Indigenous people received the majority of their medical care in segregated hospitals up until the 1990s, when reports of widespread abuse were made, the report continued.
Human rights organizations also harshly condemn Canada for the coerced and forced sterilization of Indigenous women, militarization of Indigenous territories, criminalization of Indigenous human rights defenders, and over-incarceration of Indigenous offenders nationwide.
Furthermore, Canada has a troubled history when it comes to how it has treated the children of its Indigenous people. More than 150,000 First Nations children were forcibly taken away from their families by the nation’s residential school system between 1831 and 1996.
A large number of the kids who were taken away from their homes by the church’s school system suffered from abuse, rape, and malnutrition. Specifically apologizing was given in 2008 by the Canadian government.
