While a national organization seeks to track cases of forced sterilization of Indigenous peoples across Canada, Inuit women in the North say the practice hasn’t ended.
Karen Couperthwaite, who lives in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, N.L., delivered her second son via C-section nine years ago. At the time, she said she asked for tubal ligation – a surgical process that would tie her fallopian tubes and prevent future pregnancies.
When her family decided to have a third child, she made an appointment to have the ligation reversed.
That’s when she said she found out that her tubes hadn’t been tied – they’d been removed instead. Her doctor made the discovery while reading notes in her medical file from the surgeon who performed the operation, she said.
“He had to give me news that I didn’t have my fallopian tubes left to try and conceive naturally,” she said. “It’s very shocking and hurtful, and the sting is still with me even though it’s been two years now.”
Couperthwaite registered with the Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice, a non-profit launched in 2024 that helps survivors and advocates for reproductive justice for First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.
It’s building a registry to serve as an official record of forced sterilization in Canada.
Claudette Dumont, the co-chair of the Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice, said that “removing a woman’s ability to have children is a very, very grave injustice.”
“These women are traumatized. They continue to suffer. They were suffering in silence, and this has to be addressed,” she said.
That’s why the organization held a gathering in Quebec at the start of March, where registered survivors were able to share their experiences with one another – some of those experiences were more recent, like Couperthwaite’s, while others happened decades ago.
An example of coercion
Cecilia Papak, who lives in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, told CBC News she was considering registering with the organization.
She gave birth to her daughter while on a plane from Whale Cove, Nunavut, to Winnipeg. She said she was sent back to Whale Cove, her home at the time, but was eventually medevaced back to the south because she continued to have bad bleeding.
There, she said, a doctor told her she should stop having children. She refused the surgery at the time. She said doctors kept telling her that if she had more children, she wouldn’t be able to watch her kids grow up and wouldn’t meet her grandkids.
“It was so hard for me to accept that,” she said.
“I wanted to watch my kids grow, so I had no choice but to accept the surgery they offered me because I may not live long if I continue having children.”
Now, Papak says she is happy to have grandchildren — but she wishes she never had the surgery.
‘They had no right’
Alice Simik, who also lives in Rankin Inlet, remembers the moment when as a pre-teen, her mother Annie Alogut told her that she’d had the tubal ligation procedure done in 1970. Simik said her mom only found out six years after, when a doctor, a nurse and an interpreter asked her if she wanted her tubes untied.
“I felt hurt for her,” Simik recalls.
Simik said women and their own bodies should get to decide when it’s time to stop having children.
“They had no right to just tie her tubes.”
Couperthwaite said she was shocked when she realized she wasn’t the only one who was sterilized against her will – that her situation wasn’t a one-in-a-million kind of case.
“How can you, you know, almost play God with somebody’s body and somebody’s future and not even feel the need to inform them of something that is so life-changing and life-altering?” Couperthwaite said.
Couperthwaite said she’s been sharing the Survivors Circle’s website with other women who’ve told her about similar experiences of being sterilized. She wants them to know there’s support available if they need it.