The Cruel Truth about Population Control

Chelsea Follett

Security, Global Governance

No matter how it may be rationalized, there is never any moral or practical justification for coerced sterilization.

Canada’s government has issued a report concluding that the country’s mistreatment of indigenous women amounts to genocide, citing, among other travesties, nonconsensual sterilizations. In North America, various prejudices motivate coercive population control policies; in Asia, where most forced sterilizations take place today, unfounded overpopulation alarmism acts as the primary motivation. However it may be rationalized, there is never any moral or practical justification for coerced sterilization.

In late 2018, sixty indigenous Canadian women alleged that they had suffered forced sterilizations and filed a class-action lawsuit against the Saskatchewan province health system. New allegations have continued to come forth in 2019, and one recent account claims an involuntary sterilization took place as recently as last December.

The United States has its own sinister history of forced sterilizations. Roughly seventy thousand individuals were forcibly sterilized in the twentieth century under “eugenic” legislation in the United States. Eugenics was the pseudoscience of trying to improve the population by preventing people thought to have inferior genes from having children. Marginalized groups such as Native Americans were particularly vulnerable. In the 1960s and 1970s, one out of four U.S. Native American women underwent sterilization, with that figure rising as high as 50 percent between 1970 and 1976.