Bill to make forced and coerced sterilization a criminal offence before Senate committee

A Senate committee study‐ ing a bill to establish a criminal offence with re‐ spect to sterilization proce‐ dures heard emotional tes‐ timony from a survivor of coerced sterilization on Thursday.

"It's like you wiped out a generation," Nicole Rabbit, a member of Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice, an organization for Indigenous women who are survivors of coerced and forced steriliza‐ tion, told the committee in Ottawa.

Bill S-250 an Act to Amend the Criminal Code (steriliza‐ tion procedures) would make forced and coerced steriliza‐ tion punishable under the Criminal Code by up to 14 years in prison.

The bill outlines what con‐ stitutes consent and safe‐ guards for consent, such as giving the patient the oppor‐ tunity to withdraw their con‐ sent immediately before the procedure. It also says the medical practitioner must be sure that the request for a sterilization procedure was not "as a result of external pressure or someone abus‐ ing their position of trust, power or authority."

Nicole Rabbit, a member of the Blood Tribe in Alberta, spoke to the committee Thursday about her family's experience of coerced steril‐ ization. Rabbit said she and her mother had both been coerced into sterilization in their late 20s, after each had four children.

"My daughter could have had more siblings; I could have had more siblings," said Rabbit.

"Our family would have been bigger."

Rabbit told a Senate com‐ mittee in 2022 that she gave birth by caesarian section at the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon in September 2001. After the birth, while she was still on the operating table, she said a nurse told her that she "couldn't hold another baby" and a steriliza‐ tion procedure would be in her best interest. Rabbit said she said felt pressured to say yes.

'I want an apology'

Rabbit said Thursday that her mother, who died last month, would have told the committee someone has to be accountable for the acts of genocide faced by Indige‐ nous people in regards to forced and coerced steriliza‐ tion and it must be stipulated in the Criminal Code.

"I want an apology for what happened to me," said Rabbit.

The law is the first of 13 recommendations made in a Senate report in 2022.

The report said the histor‐ ical record of forced and co‐ erced sterilization was "deeply troubling" and indi‐ cated that First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women had been disproportionately tar‐ geted, as well as Black women, and women with in‐ tersecting vulnerabilities re‐ lating to poverty, race and disability.

Sen. Yvonne Boyer, the bill's sponsor, said she heard from hundreds of people who have been a victim of coerced and forced steriliza‐ tion. She told the committee that most recently she re‐ ceived a call in December from an Indigenous mother who was sterilized without consent.

"This is a real issue that is happening today, as we speak and it is not one of the past," said Boyer.

Boyer told the committee the hope is that by adding this offence to the criminal code it will give physicians sober second thought and stop physicians from con‐ ducting a procedure without proper consent.

The bill has passed sec‐ ond reading in the Senate and is before consideration by committee. It still needs to go before the House of Com‐ mons.