The Canadian government says it is urgently trying to end the forced sterilization of Indigenous women, describing the practice as a human rights violation and a prosecutable offense. Yet police say they will not pursue a criminal investigation into a recent case in which a doctor apologized for his “unprofessional conduct” in sterilizing an Inuit woman.
In July, The Associated Press reported on the case of an Inuit woman in Yellowknife who had surgery in 2019 aimed at relieving her abdominal pain. The obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. Andrew Kotaska, did not have the woman’s consent to sterilize her, and he did so over the objections of other medical personnel in the operating room. She is now suing him.
“This is a pivotal case for Canada because it shows that forced sterilization is still happening,” said Dr. Unjali Malhotra, of the First Nations Health Authority in British Columbia. “It’s time that it be treated as a crime.”
The process of loving an institution or a country or an idea is fundamentally different from the process of loving a person.
To love a person is to accept them on every level of their being.
To love an institution is to be its harshest critic, in the hopes that we can better direct the strokes from our hammer and our chisel to reveal the sculpture within. Nobody has ever created anything beautiful by loudly claiming their block of marble is better than the rest.