Abstract
The Canadian government changed its federal Criminal Code in 1969 permitting contraception and abortion. But this law applied unevenly across the population. This chapter examines debates over how this amendment affected individuals who, due to psychiatric, intellectual or physical disabilities, lived in institutions and for whom the change in law did not necessarily bring about an era of reproductive liberty, but instead brought an increase in state surveillance during a period of deinstitutionalisation. In some cases, institutions resorted to sterilisation for residents considered incapable of parenthood, or for stated reasons of managing menstrual hygiene, even though they did not subscribe to a particular eugenics programme or provincial law. The 1970s’ human rights discourse and social movements altered the context of discussions over sexuality and disability, producing a new sub-text for the rise of newgenics, and sustained control over psychiatric populations, along with the logic that restricting reproduction was, in fact, a form of preventing the spread of mental disorder and intellectual disability.
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Notes
- 1.
Law Reform Commission of Canada, “Protection of Life: Sterilization: Implications for Mentally Retarded and Mentally Ill Persons,” Working paper 24, 1979, 27.
- 2.
Ibid., 29.
- 3.
Ibid., 31.
- 4.
For examples of this line of reasoning, see interviews with disability activists, especially Nicola Fairbrother, http://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/interviews, accessed 20 January 2018.
- 5.
For examples of scholarship on this topic, see Rebecca Kluchin, Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950–1980 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Johanna Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
- 6.
Erika Dyck, Facing Eugenics: Sterilization, Reproduction, and the Politics of Choice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Claudia Malacrida, A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015); Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990); Jana Grekul, “Social Construction of the ‘Feeble-Minded Threat’” (Ph.D. diss., University of Alberta, 2002); Tim Caulfield and Gerald Robertson, “Eugenic Policies in Alberta: From the Systematic to the Systemic?” Alberta Law Review 35, no. 1 (1996): 59–79; Terry Chapman, “Early Eugenics Movements in Western Canada,” Alberta History 25, no. 4 (1977): 9–17; Cecily Devereux, Growing a Race: Nellie L. McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism (Montreal and Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); Jane Harris-Zsovan, Eugenics and the Firewall: Canada’s Nasty Little Secret (Winnipeg: J.G. Shillingford, 2010); Leilani Muir, A Whisper Past: Childless After Eugenic Sterilization in Alberta, A Memoir by Leilani Muir (Victoria, BC: Friesen Press, 2014); Amy Samson, “Eugenics in the Community: Gendered Professions and Eugenic Sterilization in Alberta, 1928–1972,” Canadian Bulletin for Medical History/Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médecine 31, no. 1 (2014): 143–63.
- 7.
Joel Braslow, Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Alexandra Stern, “From Legislation to Lived Experience: Eugenic Sterilization in California and Indiana, 1907–79,” in A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, ed. Paul Lombardo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Paul Weindling, Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and Suffering in the Holocaust (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); and Marius Turda, ed., The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900–1945: Sources and Commentaries (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- 8.
Institute of Law Research and Reform, Edmonton, AB, Competence and Human Reproduction, Report 52 (February 1989), 2.
- 9.
Provincial Archives of Ontario, 1973. Memo to Mr. W. Darcy McKeough, MPP. From Robert Welch, Provincial Secretary.
- 10.
Provincial Archives of Ontario, Memo to: The Hon. R. Welch, Q.C., Provincial Secretary for Social Development. From Hal Jackson, Secretariat for Social Development.
- 11.
Law Reform Commission of Canada, “Protection of Life: Sterilization,” 107, 116.
- 12.
“Ontario Sterilization Ban Extended in Order to Allow Discussion of Substitute Consent Issue,” Canadian Family Physician 25 (November 1979): 1285, 1293.
- 13.
Ibid., 1293.
- 14.
Letter from Dr. Norman Brown, Canadian Medical Protective Association (CMPA), to Dr. Ian Burgess, Vice President Salvation Army Grace Hospital, Calgary, 2 November 1978, Calgary Health Services Archives, Grace Hospital-011, 1.
- 15.
Ibid., 1.
- 16.
Michel Desjardin, “The Sexualized Body of the Child. Parents and the Politics of ‘Voluntary’ Sterilization of People Labeled Intellectually Disabled,” in Sex and Disability, eds. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 69–85 (79).
- 17.
Zarfas as quoted in letter from David Luginbuhl to Canadian Family Physician, 1979, Calgary Health Services Archives, GRA-011, 1293.
- 18.
Ibid. Zarfas elaborates on this concept in: Donald Zarfas, Orientation Manual on Mental Retardation for Handicapped Individuals, Parents, Volunteers, AMR Members, Students, Citizen Advocates, Youth Groups, Professional Staff (Toronto: National Institute on Mental Retardation, 1981).
- 19.
Wolf Wolfensberger, The Principle of Normalization in Human Services (Toronto: National Institute on Mental Retardation, 1972).
- 20.
Globe and Mail (14 December 1978), 1.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961).
- 23.
“Sterilisation Ban Is Sought,” Calgary Herald, 9 December 1979.
- 24.
Donald Zarfas, “Sterilisation of the Mentally Retarded,” unpublished paper, 1978, Zarfas Papers, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health Archives.
- 25.
Letter from Dr. Norman Brown to Dr. Ian Burgess, 2 November 1978, 1.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
As reported in “Protect Mentally Ill from Sterilization, Says Law Reform Commission,” Calgary Herald, 9 December 1979, B3.
- 28.
Dyck, Facing Eugenics, 223.
- 29.
Chris Dooley, “The End of the Asylum (Town): Community Responses to the Depopulation and Closure of the Saskatchewan Hospital, Weyburn,” Histoire Sociale 44, no. 88 (2011): 331–54.
- 30.
Zarfas, “Sterilisation of the Mentally Retarded.”
- 31.
Schoen, Choice and Coercion; Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 32.
Erika Dyck and Maureen Lux, “Population Control in the ‘Global North’?: Canada’s Response to Aboriginal Reproductive Rights and Neo-Eugenics,” Canadian Historical Review 97, no. 4 (2016): 481–512.
- 33.
Zarfas, “Sterilisation of the Mentally Retarded.”
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Contraception or Eugenics? Sterilization and ‘Mental Retardation’ in the 1970s and 1980s,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin canadien d’histoire de la médecine 3, no. 1 (2014): 189–211.
- 36.
For more examples that challenge these boundaries, see eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/our-stories, accessed 20 January 2018. Some of the contemporary examples in this collection reveal the ways that elements of newgenics continue to frame ideas about capable parenthood, as well as the notion that restricting these people from parenting serves to prevent mental disorder and dependence. In particular, see stories by: Candace, Eric, and Velvet.
- 37.
Letter from David Luginbuhl to Lieutenant-Colonel Routly, Women’s Social Services Secretary, Salvation Army Headquarters, 16 May 1983, 1–2, GRA-011, Calgary Health Services Archives.
- 38.
Zarfas, “Sterilisation of the Mentally Retarded.”
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Institute of Law Research and Reform, Edmonton, Alberta, Sterilization Decisions: Minors and Mentally Incompetent Adults, Report for Discussion No. 6, March 1988, 2.
- 41.
Ibid., 1. Rebecca Kluchin found that by 1975 sterilisation was the most popular form of birth control used by married couples in the United States, with 7.9 million operations performed only 2 years after the law changed permitting such surgeries. See Kluchin, Fit to Be Tied, 1.
- 42.
Nancy Tomes, “The Patient as a Policy Factor: A Historical Case Study of the Consumer/Survivor Movement in Mental Health,” Health Affairs 25, no. 3 (January 2006): 720–29.
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Dyck, E. (2019). Newgenics and the Politics of Choice: A Historical Look at Canada’s Psychiatric Institutions in the 1970s. In: Kritsotaki, D., Long, V., Smith, M. (eds) Preventing Mental Illness. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98699-9_11
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