Maybe it was Hitler week on the History channel, or it might have been that time when I got on a World War 2 kick, youtube style. Anyway, however I got into it I found myself looking around the world wide web at the history of Eugenics. Eugenics, which roughly translates to "good generation" from the Greek, is the (or was the) 'science' of improving the 'inheritable' characteristics of a race or a collective through control of breeding (I find it hard to define Eugenics without using lots of scare quotes). It was a pretty popular movement in the decades before WWII, before Hitler showed the world just what evil such a notion would lead to, now it is much maligned.
Associating this movement with Nazism and forced sterilizations I was not expecting to find that in 1928 Alberta passed the Sexual Sterilization Act which creating a Eugenics Board with power to order the sterilization of anyone it deemed mentally defective or generally unfit for procreation. You might expect that this was a short-lived act, but it was only repealed in 1972 when lawmakers deemed it "offensive". Before it was repealed, however, over 2800 Albertans were sterilized. The most famous case of forced sterilization was that of Leilani Muir: she was sent to the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives in 1944. While there she underwent surgery, supposedly to remove her appendix; years later, when married, she discovered that she had in fact been sterilized during that procedure. Nasty stuff.
British Columbia passed its own sterilization act in 1933, and is thought to have performed the procedure on some hundreds of people before it was repealed in 1973. In both provinces natives, immigrants, single mothers, and the poor were often the victims of forced sterilization.
Unsavory I know, but there it is.
http://eugenicsarchive.ca/
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