In efforts to accurately identify, prosecute and prevent the non-consensual sterilization of women in Canada, Independent Senator Yvonne Boyer will be asking Parliament and the Senate to amend the Criminal Code when they return to the Hill in September.
In efforts to accurately identify, prosecute and prevent the non-consensual sterilization of women in Canada, Independent Senator Yvonne Boyer will be asking Parliament and the Senate to amend the Criminal Code when they return to the Hill in September.
Bill S-228 advocates for the amendment of the Criminal Code to include a definition of sterilization and acknowledges that coerced or forced sterilization holds a legacy of systemic discrimination, colonization and racism “that disproportionately, but not exclusively, affects Indigenous and racialized persons.”
“I think it’s going to make a difference. But this is not the end all and be all; this is just one tool in the toolbox,” said Boyer. “I think it’s going to be a deterrent. And I think the doctors that are doing this — which I’d like to say is just a handful of doctors that are the bad apples that are doing this — are going to be deterred because of where it sits in the Criminal Code.”
Boyer is a member of the Métis Nation with her ancestral roots in the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan, Manitoba and the Red River. Having begun her professional career as a nurse, she then began to practice law to address injustices faced by Métis, First Nations and Inuit Peoples in Canada. She practiced law for over 27 years and has published books on Indigenous health.
The groundwork for the bill was laid in 2015, before Boyer had become a Senator, when she was practicing law and studying the intersections of health, law and Indigenous experiences.
She received a phone call from Betty Ann Adam, a reporter with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, who had interviewed two women, both of whom said they were sterilized without their consent in a Saskatoon hospital.
“I said, ‘that’s against the law. It’s an assault’,” said Boyer. “You can’t do that. There are laws against sterilizing people, even touching people without their consent.”
The article was published, and soon, more and more women came forward with similar experiences, said Boyer.
“Two more came forward, two more, two more, two more, two more,” she said. “Pretty soon, there were 11 women that came forward with the same story from the same hospital, and I’m doing interviews all across the country saying, ‘this just can’t be done. This is terrible.”
Boyer soon heard from the local health authority asking her to conduct an external review on tubal ligation policies. The Indigenous elders also asked for her.
She said her conditions were that “whatever I find,” the results of the report be made public. She also requested a Dr. Judy Bartlett, a Métis physician, researcher and health administrator with decades of experience in Indigenous health, as a co-author.
Together, Boyer and Bartlett published the report, titled “Tubal Ligation in the Saskatoon Health Region: The Lived Experience of Aboriginal Women” on July 11, 2017
The review stated that “many of the Aboriginal women interviewed were living often overwhelming and complex lives when they were coerced [and] their lives were intricately bound within an overriding negative historical context of colonialism.” Sixteen women called to speak to the reviewers; seven were interviewed.
“The government comments were like, ‘this is horrible, something has to be done … All that hand-wringing,” said Boyer. “And it was starting; people were starting to realize that the racism runs pretty deep
Following the publication of the report, the first class action lawsuit was launched against the Saskatchewan government. There have been several more since then, stretching across the country.
“When I was appointed to the Senate, in my very first speech, I talked about the forced and coerced sterilization of Indigenous women… And since that time, I’ve been advocating for the eradication of forced sterilization of Indigenous women and anybody who is undergoing these procedures without proper consent,” she said. “So, my office became very much a safe haven for women to call me and tell me about what had been going on with them.”
Her office began to dig into the research and try to learn about how deep this issue went, said Boyer. In the research for S-228, they found that between 1971 and 2018, over 10,000 Indigenous women have been sterilized in the province of Saskatchewan alone.
“You attack the women, you crush the community,” said Boyer. “It’s the soul of the nation.”
Reports from the senate standing committee on human rights, called “The Scars We Carry”, identified the historical context of forced and coerced sterilization, which includes “as a strategy to subjugate and eliminate First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples, and noticed that “official policies of sterilization emerged in the 1920s “as part of the eugenics movement and formed part of a genocidal policy against Indigenous peoples.”
“We did a general overview of how deep the problem is. And we looked at the disability community, the intersex community. We had witnesses from the government. We had legal experts come in. We had people whose voices needed to be heard,” said Boyer. “We had Black women come in from Nova Scotia who had been subjected to hysterectomies without consent. So that gave us an understanding of how deep the problems lie within this country.
“Up to this point, probably hundreds of survivors had said that they wanted it criminalized.”
The first form of the bill to criminalize forced or coerced sterilization was S-250, which was unanimously accepted at committee, then unanimously passed through the Senate. It was sent to the House of Commons in October 2024.
Soon after, Parliament was prorogued and dissolved, and S-250 with it. In June of this year, Boyer brought it back, now renamed as S-228.
With proceedings paused for the summer, the bill will be studied by the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee starting in September. Conservative MP Jamie Schmale, who represents Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes, will sponsor the bill in the House of Commons.
“There’s been unanimous support. There hasn’t been anybody who has not supported the bill. Who’s going to say they want this done?” she said. “Who’s going to say this is a good thing, to sterilize people without their consent?
“I think it will provide a good deterrent for that, and I think it will provide some relief for the women that have been sterilized and worrying about their own daughters being sterilized against their will.”
In 2023, Boyer helped form the Survivors’ Circle of Reproductive Justice, a non-profit that has created a registry of women who have been sterilized. The organization also received funding to create “healing funds” and is part of the “national focus” on stopping sterilization, said Boyer.
“It’s another tool that is looking at data, gathering research, documenting how many people have been sterilized,” said Boyer. “It goes hand-in-hand with the bill.”
Throughout the research process, Boyer said they’ve learned from other places that have seen the same issues, like Peru, Greenland, Ecuador and Sweden.
“This is a problem that affects Indigenous people disproportionately all over the world. We’re working on Canada right now, but there’s hope for it to stop, and there’s an army of people working on this.”
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