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.”
Thing is, some people have weaponized that “come on, no WAY” moment. They say “there must be some missing context that makes this okay” and then they dismiss the issue without having established that context. My mother did that with Elijah McClain’s murder. When she found out that they injected him with ketamine, she said “Well something must have been going wrong, they don’t give people that kind of drug for nothing”. For her, that settled the matter. It wasn’t until I taught her about so-called “excited delirium” and how cops and EMTs have conspired to make non-compliance a medical diagnosis so that they have an excuse to tranquilize people who piss them off that she even considered that someone may have done something wrong.
Furthermore, it was wildly irresponsible of dude to try to guess what that context was. “He didn’t want to go through the process of waking her up, getting consent and then anaesthetizing her again so he just ripped out a few extra organs while he was in there.” Trying to establish the idea that it’s okay to ruin someone’s body for the sake of convenience is just unimaginably gross. Assuming what they said was actually the truth and not just their conjecture in trying to justify this, that behavior in and of itself justifies prison and a loss of license to practice medicine. This situation is so fucked up that the extra context that had to be posited from nothing doesn’t actually absolve anyone of guilt.