Class Action Suit Alleges Quebec Hospitals Sterilized Indigenous Women Without Consent

Aug 12, 2023

Quebec’s Superior Court has authorized a class action lawsuit filed on Monday by two Indigenous women who say they were sterilized by doctors without their consent after their fifth births. The court says it’s authorizing the suit on behalf of “all women of Atikamekw origin who have undergone surgery that has impaired their fertility without having given their free and informed consent since 1980,” per the Canadian Press. A 2022 study from the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue found that at least 35 Inuit women in Quebec have been sterilized against their will since 1980.

The lawsuit states that three doctors violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and Quebec’s civil code and owe unspecified damages to the lead plaintiffs, identified as U.T. and M.X., as well as all Atikamekw women who have been subjected to forced sterilizations.

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As in the U.S., where varying legal loopholes allow forced sterilizations to persist to this day, there’s an extensive history of Indigenous women being subjected to these procedures without their consent in Canada. A 2021 report shared by the Canadian government acknowledged “a significant power imbalance between Indigenous women and their doctors,” and that this is “complicated by language and cultural barriers” which can lead to Indigenous women signing consent forms they don’t understand.

Here in the U.S., over a six-year period in the 1970s, physicians sterilized an estimated 25 to 42% of Indigenous women of childbearing age. At the height of the eugenics movement in the U.S. in the early 20th century, at least 70,000 people in 32 states were subjected to involuntary sterilizations that disproportionately targeted disabled people, poor people, and Indigenous people and people of color. Individual states’ attempts to make amends for historical forced sterilizations have ranged from a reparations program in California to an outreach program in Utah to “apologize” to survivors.

Quebec Superior Court Justice Lukasz Granosik wrote in his judgment authorizing the class action suit this week, “It is quite possible to argue that sterilising a woman without her free and informed consent constitutes a civil fault, ethical misconduct, a criminal act and a violation of [Quebec’s] charter of human rights and freedoms.”