This post details the results of advocacy before regional and United Nations human rights bodies, summarizing the growing body of recommendations, statements, and judgments that more fully define forced sterilization as a human rights violation and guide governments in addressing this harmful practice.
At the CSW last week, IJRC hosted a parallel event on preventing and redressing forced sterilization, with perspectives contributed by advocates working on these issues in both Canada and Kenya. In addition to the parallel event, IJRC also made a written submission , summarizing the relevant human rights standards and making recommendations for State action to prevent and redress forced sterilization.
Importantly, these interventions resulted in strong concluding observations from the CAT, which urged Canada to take specific measures to prevent, investigate, and criminalize forced sterilization, and in a detailed and pointed set of recommendations in a statement from the IACHR in January Learn more about this work on our webpage on forced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada.
This advocacy has contributed to widespread media attention on forced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada, and prompted responses from Canadian officials. At the end of January , the Canadian House of Commons Health Committee agreed to conduct a two-day study into the prevalence of coerced sterilization in Canada. In some instances, governments authorize these procedures, as is the case when national laws require transgender persons to undergo sterilization in exchange for official recognition of their gender identity.
In other instances, governments fail to prevent forced sterilization through appropriate oversight and regulation; and, in many places, governments continue to deny redress to survivors, including those sterilized pursuant to prior eugenics and population control policies.
Over the past three years, regional and universal human rights courts and monitoring bodies have increasingly addressed forced sterilization as a human rights violation and have highlighted how forced sterilization affects vulnerable or marginalized groups. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile.
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Government U. Foreign Policy U. Liberal Politics U. Tom Head. Civil Liberties Expert. Tom Head, Ph. Updated August 09, Featured Video. The Concept of Eugenics Merriam-Webster defines eugenics as "a science that tries to improve the human race by controlling which people become parents. Cite this Article Format. Head, Tom. Forced Sterilization in the United States. What Is Eugenics? Definition and History. More recently, California prisons are said to have authorized sterilizations of nearly female inmates between and But California is far from being the only state with such troubled practices.
You can find out more information on state-by-state sterilization policies, the number of victims, institutions where sterilizations were performed, and leading opponents and proponents. A third of the sterilizations were done on girls under 18, even as young as 9. Gregory W. Rutecki, MD writes about the forced sterilization of Native Americans , which persisted into the s and s, with examples of young women receiving tubal ligations when they were getting appendectomies.
Forced sterilization programs are also a part of history in Puerto Rico, where sterilization rates are said to be the highest in the world. Madrigal v. Buck v. Bell : In , Carrie Buck, a poor white woman, was the first person to be sterilized in Virginia under a new law.
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