Internationally, sterilisation is by far the most well-known facet of eugenics, and this contribution to the literature considers applications of the relevant law in the western Canadian province of Alberta. A total of 2822 individuals were rendered infertile under the provisions of the Sexual Sterilization Act, which came into force in 1928 and was repealed in 1972. To gain a sense of perspective, Denmark, a country with a population roughly twice that of Alberta, sterilised 12 735 people between 1929 and 1968. Since fewer than 200 individuals were operated on in British Columbia and no other province had similar laws in place, we may conclude that Canada’s experiment in negative eugenics was of smaller magnitude than what obtained in Scandinavia. Canada’s sterilisation programme was also much less virulent than that of the United States. The end result, however, amounted to exactly the same for the individuals who lost the ability to conceive. A strength of this book is the focus on named persons. Each chapter is based around a particular case history, two of which, the cases of Doreen Befus and Leilani Muir, became causes célèbres in Canada. Befus has taken up patient activism, while Muir successfully sued the Alberta government for almost a million dollars in 1996. Other cases in which men are the subjects, prove that sterilisation in Alberta was not principally directed at women, as it was in Scandinavia.
The book is interesting and contains findings which will be of use to scholars beyond Canada. For instance, Dyck contends that the sterilisation programme was not targeted at indigenous people in its early days. This was because the eugenists believed that Native Canadians would die out anyway. Only when this proved to be unfounded in the late 1960s, did the sterilisation programme seriously begin focusing on First Nations and Métis communities. Nevertheless, the familiar pattern whereby ethnic minorities were disproportionately affected also holds true for Canada. Aboriginal people represented 2%–3% of Alberta’s population but 6%–8% of the total number of sterilisations. Among Caucasians, Eastern European immigrants were more likely than other groups to be sterilised. Although Anglo-Saxon middle-class norms made up the basis of Canadian identity, even settlers from Britain were sometimes viewed with disfavour.
It should be stressed that many of the sterilisations were initiated with the express approval of the patient as a means of permanent contraception. A laudable aspect of the book is that it weaves threads of abortion, contraception and sterilisation together in a unified whole. This leads to a more nuanced understanding of the facts. It is likely that Facing Eugenics will establish itself as the standard work on sterilisation in Canada, supplanting a handful of articles. That is not to say that it covers all aspects of eugenics.
As in other national contexts, support for sterilisation and eugenics was not limited to the conservative sections of society. The feminists of the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA) supported greater rights for women generally. The political party to which they belonged had been in power since 1921, and in 1923 the UFWA advocated a sterilisation law for people with learning difficulties. Its justification lay partly in the savings to be made in terms of health care and policing and partly in the contemporary belief that paedophilia was caused by moronity. Violet McNaughton, who established many branches of the United Farm Women in and beyond Alberta, was an agrarian socialist. Other organised women also supported eugenics. They were in favour of birth control and wished to use it differentially to extend middle-class values. Eugenics was a relatively new doctrine in the 1920s and seemed to offer solutions to some intransigent social problems.
There are seven chapters and a conclusion, each focusing on a particular aspect of reproductive medicine. These cases show the inherent complexity of the topic as it manifested itself in the period under consideration. They also make clear that family consent for an individual to be sterilised might not be much of a safeguard. Leilani Muir was not on good terms with her parents and many families were either gullible or lacked the resources to challenge the recommendations of doctors. Very interesting is how a Catholic newspaper primarily for German immigrants temporarily suspended its objections to sterilisation in the wake of the Nazis introducing their law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring in 1933. As elsewhere, political Catholics opposed eugenics, though Pope Pius XI’s encyclical from 1931 had only castigated sterilisation, not eugenics in toto. It was also illuminating to follow the author’s argument about how intelligence tests might be administered to patients in asylums with the hidden agenda of obtaining evidence which would allow sterilisation to go ahead.
Dyck is able to write engagingly and objectively about a dark chapter in Canada’s history and the controversies surrounding reproductive rights to boot. It is no mean feat to receive funding from state research councils, to lay the evidence fairly before the reader and to argue that first-wave feminism was influenced by eugenics. The book gives the impression of being truthful and not having been written to satisfy prior opinions or motives. Given the amount of work that has been done on American eugenics, it is mildly surprising that a book on this topic has not appeared until recently. It complements Angus McLaren’s Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945, published as long ago as 1990, but the bibliography reveals that there is considerable scope for further monographs. Dyck is forced to rely on an undergraduate thesis and a master’s thesis for some crucial information. This is hardly a weakness; it only reinforces the same point about there being space for other studies.
