Eugenic sterilization: the sterilization of a person who is either mentally ill/ defective and will either severely handicap any future offspring through heredity or is unable to properly care for a child. (googled definition). But Dyck focus on
“The notion of voluntary sterilization therefore needs to be considered within this broader historical context, bookended in Canada by two pieces of legislation; one in 1929 that used surgeries as a coercive measure of population control and the other that swung the door open for the legal use of sterilization as a form of contraception in 1969.” (169).
“She explores how the post-World War II ideas about ideal families collided with the rise of birth control advocacy to create a new genics movement.” (169).
“Angus and Arlene McLaren initiated that process in their thorough account of the history of birth control, contraceptives, and abortion across the country, and although they found evidence of working-class women being sterilized in Ontario already in the 1930s, they emphasized the way in which sterilization used as birth control divided the contraceptive movement among Canadian reformers more specifically after the Second World War.13 Georgina Feldberg has also shown how the increase in women’s hospitals, particularly those run by female obstetricians, created new flows of information and obstetrical practices that included access to contraception and voluntary sterilization, even while the laws restricted these activities.14 In a comprehensive study of the laws surrounding contraception in Canada, Brenda Margaret Appleby likewise points to responses, particularly from the religious community, to news that women were seeking sterilization as an extension of birth control.15 By bringing together elements of the birth control movement with the history of sterilization, both eugenic and voluntary, it becomes clear that some Canadian women promoted a sterilization agenda that was much more complicated than that explained through the eugenics program or the birth control movements independently. Given Alberta’s active and long-standing eugenics program, its physicians, more so than those in neighboring provinces it seemed, began receiving requests for sterilization surgeries in the late 1940s from women seeking to be relieved of the burden of fertility. Several of these physicians sought advice from professional organizations as they considered the legal circumstances surrounding these operations. Those accounts offer perhaps the most conclusive proof that sterilization operations occurred on the margins of the eugenics program in Alberta. Together these records indicate that married, middle-class women on the prairies, Catholic and Protestant alike, behaved in step with their counterparts throughout much of the United States and Europe in seeking surgical and permanent solutions to birth control at least as early as the 1930s and in growing numbers after the Second World War.” (170).
“Women seeking surgical sterilization before the 1970s when the practice was decriminalized are more difficult to find in the historical record.” (171).
“…feminists in Alberta began articulating this relationship during the 1930s’ depression. In 1938 the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA) made a thorough inquiry of the birth control issue in their province, and came out in support of relaxing the laws restricting its use. Many of these women were, of course, the same ones who had championed the Sexual Sterilization Act and its resultant eugenics program.17 Recognizing that the chief opponents to this perspective lay within Catholic circles, UFWA members pointed to ways in which Protestant religious groups had embraced birth control as a matter that ultimately supported national health, rather than simply corroding it. It cited several organizations that had openly supported birth control by the end of the depression, including the Federated Council of Churches in the United States, the Central Conference of Jewish Rabbis, the American Unitarian Association, and the Methodist Episcopal Church. Furthermore, the UFWA recognized the growing support from medical, nursing, and labour organizations alongside endorsements from several members of professional classes, including economists, statesmen, doctors, and philanthropists, in an effort to show the way in which this idea had gained credibility.” (171)
“The most vehement critics of birth control, according to its study, remained those who clung to Catholic religious views, or those who believed that birth control appealed exclusively to a selfish, materialistic, and even secular middle-class. In an effort to combat those assertions, the UFWA proposed a resolution in 1938 to amend the Criminal Code of Canada, and to relax the laws on birth control.” (172)
“The rationale explaining the proposed amendment encouraged women to demystify the taboos surrounding birth control by talking more openly about the subject. “Have you been hesitating about mentioning such delicate personal matters as birth-control in your home? Have you been horrified at the boldness of some women who have broached such subjects in your club meetings? Well, if the Church of England and the Bishops of that church from their pulpits and in public meetings of every kind can urge consideration of these questions, surely we women talking among ourselves can afford to discuss them.” (172)
“This 1938 resolution reframed the issue of birth control as a women’s issue and as a family issue, and recast reproductive rights as collective rights that spanned across the classes and around the globe. “All over the world today we see women in a great social revolution, struggling for emancipation, protesting against sex servitude and asserting their right to voluntary motherhood.”22 Furthermore, the claims that the underclasses and feeble-minded individuals were out-producing the more “desirable elements” were countered by the suggestion that “these statistics do not tell of the overworked fathers, of the unceasing and increasing pain of over-burdened mothers, of the agony of children fighting their way against the handicaps of ill health, insufficient food, lack of education and toil that breaks the spirit.”23 Even maintaining that women were suited for work in the home, “that doesn’t necessarily mean that any woman shall have so large a family as to make a drudge of her for the rest of her life.” Roper continued and pointed out that “… our great women writers, teachers, painters, musicians, physicians, leaders of public thought, etc., are with very few exceptions all women with small families.” (172-173)
“Returning to the arguments put forth by the religious opposition to birth control, Briggs and her supporters emphasized the importance of family values as inseparable from Christian morals and thus resisting the temptation to embrace contraception.” (173)
“The explicit description of “voluntary motherhood” invokes contraceptive imagery and suggests that these women, already by the beginning of the Second World War, were conceptualizing reproductive rights as a form of modern, perhaps even scientific, feminism.” (173)
“Taking this position one step further, already by the mid-1920s the paper had begun describing the dangers associated with birth control, and in particular how it degraded motherhood and even stimulated disease among women. Featuring an address from a medical professional in an effort to bolster its position, the paper contended “contraception is not in harmony with nature and is therefore wrong according to any standard of morality, indulgence with the aid of contraception, whether marital or extra-marital, is an unnatural sexual vice, because it gives sexual pleasure in a manner and for a purpose contrary to the biological aim of the act.” (174)
““President Er. Wm. G. Morgan, who is not a Catholic, expressed himself as follows: ‘the question of birth control is of vital importance to the future of our country, since it affects directly the survival of the white race and its dominance in world progress.’” (176)
““sterilization facilitates sexual promiscuity, which spreads social disease.”47 The article went on to explain that cases such as these justify the maintenance of long-stay custodial hospitals to contain individuals of low intelligence quotients and of severe disabilities, who, if sterilized, could become promiscuous. “ (177)
““the birth control movement is a deadly cancer on the body social and the world over.”48 The article concluded with a simple solution: “there is positively only one way of solving the birth control problem and that is bringing Christ closer to the hearts of men.”49 The Catholic Church held a firm position on reproduction and furnished opponents to the birth control movement with strong language to justify its position. The Catholic condemnation of all forms of birth control, including sterilization, stemmed from a fundamental belief in a traditional set of circumscribed roles for the sexes, including safeguarding women as a subservient, but distinctly celebrated “mother of the race.” Any medical or private interventions aimed at challenging this “natural” role the Church regarded as blasphemous and criticism was leveled at women and their increasingly secular doctors. For instance, the newspaper reported that “women who have been defrauded of their most glorious privilege, [with] the race … being robbed of its future in the name of medical science, is sufficient demand for physicians who know that their sacred calling is to cure and not to kill.”” (177-178)
“In spite of the Catholic opposition to birth control, including sexual sterilization operations, men and women throughout the 20th century had long searched for methods to control their fertility and Protestants and Catholics alike participated in this quest.” (178)
“During the 1940s and 1950s, decades before the decriminalization of birth control, healthy women slowly gained confidence to negotiate these operations with their doctors at the margins of the law. Meanwhile, opponents to the practice inspired claims that the procedure would lead to promiscuity, regret, and serious mental illness. In spite of these warnings, the clinical evidence in Canada, and in Alberta especially, suggests that married couples sought out these operations. Alongside campaigns for access to other forms of regulated birth control” (178)
- The place of writing / of the author, his or her nationality, and institutional affiliation
Based on middle-class women of Alberta BC,
- The nature of the research: is it archival, synthetic, or conceptual?
- Peer review: Was it reviewed by other scholars?
-Yes
- Does the writer belong to an intellectual school? Has he or she a mentor?
-Erika Dyck
-PhD (McMaster), MA (USask), BA (Dalhousie)
-Professor, Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine
-Faculty Member in History
- Was the scholarship financed?
Published by University of Toronto Press, unsure if financed.
- Is the author a senior or junior scholar?
–Senior
- Does the piece fit into a specific, prominent, and ongoing debate?
-specific and ongoing debate on sterilization of men and women
- Is the piece revolutionary in character or does it add to an existing understanding and approach?
-adds to an existing knowledge and understanding.
- The degree of impact it made on you, the reader.
–got a lot of great information from this paper, and allowed me to find even more recourses I hope to use to gather more information.
- The reading log should indicate any additional references, which were extracted from the piece (other books, articles, etc.).
-Tracy Penny Light, “Shifting Interests: The Medical Discourse on Abortion in English Canada, 1850- 1969,” PhD thesis, University of Waterloo, 2003.
– Wendy Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002)
– Shannon Stettner, “‘He is still unwanted’: Women’s Assertions of Authority over Abortion in Letters to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 29,
– Brenda Margaret Appleby, Responsible Parenthood: Decriminalizing Contraception in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), see especially p. 31, 98.
– 4 The Criminal Code, 1892, S.C. 1892, c. 29. See also Constance Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: Women’s Press/ Osgoode Society, 1991).
