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

A Senate committee studying a bill to establish a criminal offence with respect to sterilization procedures heard emotional testimony 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 sterilization, told the committee in Ottawa.

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

The bill outlines what constitutes consent and safeguards for consent, such as giving the patient the opportunity to withdraw their consent 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 abusing 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 sterilization. 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 committee 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 sterilization 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 Indigenous people in regards to forced and coerced sterilization 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 historical record of forced and coerced sterilization was "deeply troubling" and indicated that First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women had been disproportionately targeted, as well as Black women, and women with intersecting vulnerabilities relating 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 sterilization. She told the committee that most recently she received 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 conducting a procedure without proper consent. 

The bill has passed second reading in the Senate and is before consideration by committee. It still needs to go before the House of Commons.