In early April 2019, the CBC reported yet another case of the coerced sterilization of an Indigenous woman in Saskatchewan. The woman in question was pressured to consent to a tubal ligation before undergoing a caesarian section, which she underwent in December 2018. Coerced sterilization is not a historic practice, this occurred just months ago.

This case occurred in the wake of investigations into the coerced sterilization of Indigenous women in Saskatchewan, and calls for action. An external review conducted for the Saskatoon Health Region by Senator Yvonne Boyer and Dr. Judith Bartlett in 2017 reports on interviews with women who had experienced coerced sterilization, in Saskatchewan, eliciting more reports from women across the country who have experienced coerced sterilization as well.

The ongoing coerced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada is part of a long and broad history of sterilization of marginalized women in Canada. Women of colour, poor women, Indigenous women, and women with intellectual disabilities, has long been occurring in different ways, at different times. The connection between colonialism and forced and coerced sterilization is particularly clear in articles which trace the relationship between “population control” programs in the Global South and the coerced sterilization of indigenous women in Canada and elsewhere.

Documents in the archives point to the range of these practices, including reports in the 1970s that women were required to undergo sterilization if they were seeking abortions in order to continue to be eligible for social assistance. The demands of the 1970 Abortion Caravan articulate this concern well, asserting that “…all governments of this country allow their welfare departments to permit abortions for women on welfare only if they agree to sterilization and this in return for a mere pittance to feed their existing children.” The same concern is reported in a 1976 issue of The Other Woman which indicates that “immigrant women, in particular, still face forced sterilization as the price for an abortion.” When the abortion law was being challenged in the late 1980s, these concerns were raised once again, with activists refusing “to accept a law, which allows for doctors to insist on the sterilization of Black and Native women, as a prerequisite for an abortion.”

The archives include many other documents that address forced sterilization in Canada and around the world, including (to name a few):

• The March-April 1979 issue of Prairie Woman: A Newsletter of Saskatoon Women’s Liberation, which includes an article on the International Campaign for Abortion Rights and the evolution of the slogan “no forced sterilization” (Taken from a presentation by Nancy Walker to the Women’s Action Collective in Regina).
• An article by Jane Arnott in the March 1977 issue of Upstream, reporting on the outcomes of the Badgley Commission on the Operation of the Abortion Law, including its work on sterilization
• A 1988 report by DAWN Canada chronicling the experiences of forced and coerced sterilization among women with disabilities.

All images from a 1977 article that appeared in Upstream on the international context of forced sterilization.