Features My sister’s heart problems required us to regularly travel to Toronto for consultation. And given my father’s attitude to parenting, my mother was essentially on her own. Her doctor told her to go see the obstetrician/ gynecologist (OB/GYN) in town, believing there might be some lingering complications from her pregnancy. The OB/GYN hardly spoke to her, and only asked if she wanted more children. My mother replied that she wanted to wait and see. She had always wanted four children, but at the time knew she wanted to wait before having another pair. My mother explained to me, “When I said I wanted to wait, when I looked up, he was looking at your sister, and looked over at you, and he said, ‘Okay, we’ll do a D&C and that’ll take care of your health problems.’” My mother wasn’t told that D&C stands for dilation and curettage of the cervix, nor did he tell her that it can result in Asherman’s syndrome, which can cause miscarriage and infertility. She didn’t receive any follow-up care, and only learned 25 years later about the surgical damage that caused her three subsequent miscarriages and permanent infertility. “He looked at me like I was white trash, and young and stupid, and I shouldn’t be having any more kids, and I think he just sort of made that decision,” my mother told me. “I was just one of those young stupid women, and I was just going to be having babies ’til I died, and so he was going to fix it. His attitude toward me was obvious. He didn’t think I was smart enough to bother explaining anything to me, or to give me op-
March 31, 2014 www.mcgilldaily.com | The McGill Daily
tions. I think our whole interview was 15 minutes. He made his entire judgement of me in that 15 minutes.” The 15 minutes my mother’s doctor took to make his decision is still more than the five minutes the Alberta Eugenics Board gave to its own life-altering decisions. The Alberta Eugenics Board Established in 1928 through the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta, the Alberta Eugenics Board consisted of two doctors, nominated by the Senate of the University of Alberta (U of A) and the Council of the College of Physicians, and two non-medical members, appointed by the Lieutenant Governor. The Act decreed that when an institutionalized patient was to be discharged, the Board had to rule whether the patient could be discharged without “the danger of procreation” and the “risk of multiplication of the evil by the transmission of the disability” to any potential children. In cases where a patient had an inheritable disability or disease, the Board could order the surgical sterilization of that inmate as a condition of their discharge. Originally taking an hour to review each case, by the mid-1930s the Board took a mere five minutes to deliberate the authorization of a sterilization. Initially, the Act required the consent of the individual’s parent or guardian, but under William Aberhart’s Social Credit government, the requirement for consent was removed for individuals labelled as “mental defectives.” This included “any person in whom there is a condition of arrested or incomplete development of mind existing
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“The next time the doctor came in he said, ‘You know, you really don’t have to take her home, we’ve got places we can keep her, she’s not going to do anything, your life will be better if you just leave her.’” The author’s mother On her experience discovering that her daughter has Down syndrome before the age of 18 years, whether arising from inherent causes or induced by disease or injury.” It also included individuals with drug or alcohol addictions, epilepsy, or syphilitic infections of the central nervous system. The Act protected everyone else involved, including parents or guardians, Board members, the province, and surgeons, from civil liability for sterilizations. I spoke to Robert A. Wilson to learn more about eugenic practices in Canada. A professor of Philosophy and Educational Policy Studies at the U of A, he is the principal investigator of the Living Archives of Eugenics in Western Canada, a project focused on working together with sterilization survivors in Alberta to inform the story of eugenics in Canada. “Legislated eugenic practices in British Columbia [BC] and Alberta operated primarily through ‘training schools’ for people deemed feeble-minded or mentally deficient – often wrongfully,” he told me. “This meant
in practice that people who were poor, who were immigrants thought to be of ‘inferior stock,’ who were Indigenous, who were neglected or abused in their home environments, became the effective principal targets of those practices.” Training schools were a form of institution for individuals, mostly children, who had mental or physical disabilities, or who were considered social undesirables. My sister could have ended up at one. The principal training school in Alberta was called the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives, in Red Deer, Alberta. In 1955, a child named Leilani Scorah (later Muir) was institutionalized by her mother at the Red Deer school, the site of the majority of the province’s sterilizations. Four years later, having scored below 70 on an IQ test, Muir was sterilized without her consent by order of the Board. She was told, like many others, that she was to have an appendectomy. In 1995,