Digging again into a “forgotten” chapter of Canada’s history, one must note that it was a gaggle of physicians who saw to it that legislation such as the Sexual Sterilization Act was passed in the British Columbia Legislature. Despite opposition by the archbishop of Vancouver and a group of “health cultists,” an act was passed that called for a Board of Eugenics to be established.
Angus McLaren, in his account Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada 1885-1945 wrote: “It should be further stressed that doctors not only assisted in the formulations of such programs, they also helped legislate them into being. In the 1926 Legislative Assembly, five of the 48 MLA’s were doctors, including J.D. MacLean, who called for the first survey of the feeble-minded, and E.J. Rothwell, who chaired the Royal Commission on Mental Hygene. The 1928 assembly included six doctors and a druggist.”
He added: “The North American eugenics movement in fact began as an offshoot of the American Breeders Association and so it was altogether fitting that it was with Tolmie as premier and in a legislature that included a pharmacist and seven doctors (the highest number of medical men ever to occupy seats in the Legislative Assembly) that the province’s Board of Eugenics was established.”
The year 1933 saw British Columbia become the second province in Canada (after Alberta) to pass legislation that allowed the sterilization of the mentally ill and retarded.
As a closet historian, I was intrigued by this note: “Given the fact that 1933 was the same year in which the Nazis began their own campaign for racial hygiene in Germany, it might well be asked if British Columbia’s sterilization law indicates that Canada also harboured fascist sentiments and programs. An analysis of the sterilization debate in British Columbia reveals that in fact, eugenically based racial concerns were all-pervasive in interwar Canadian society and the most extreme policies tended to be advanced not by conservatives, but by progressives and medical scientists.”
I would be reticent if I neglected the views of the loudest pro-choice voice in British Columbia, that of the Vancouver Sun. Its editorialist in November of 1927 stated on this very topic: “It is an admitted fact in every civilized country of the world today that the unfit are multiplying at a rate something like double of the fit. Thus, for every child born with mental, physical and moral ability to maintain and promote civilization, two are born with the instincts to flout the essential discipline of civilization and tear civilization down.”
It should come as no surprise then that the Vancouver Sun published Henry Morgentaler’s essay on the link between abortion and the decrease in crime on two occasions.
Dr. Patricia Baird, chair of the multi-million dollar Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, co-wrote a paper in the British Columbia Medical Journal, April 1982, in which she stated: “It has been said that economics have no place in medicine, but in reality, economic consequences of offering medical genetic services must be considered in planning for future expansion. The average lifetime cost to the provincial government of caring for one person with Down syndrome is approximately $196,000. Avoidance of this cost is referred to as a ‘benefit’ from prenatal diagnosis. The study concluded that it is cost-beneficial to offer prenatal diagnosis for Down syndrome to women aged 34 and up at the time of conception.”
And why would that be? The obvious answer is that if the woman aborts, then the cost “benefit” would be realized. Thanks to this reasoning, there are a lot less Down syndrome children populating British Columbia.and the cost savings to us, the taxpayers, must have been enormous. Really!
Dr. Leo Alexander, of Nuremberg war crimes trial fame, noted about the Nazis: “A widely used high school mathematics text, Mathematics in the Service of National Political Education, includes problems stated in distorted terms of the cost of caring for and rehabilitating the chronically sick and crippled. One of the problems asked, for instance, was (about) how many new housing units could be built and how many marriage-allowance loans could be given to newly wedded couples for the amount of money it cost the state to care for ‘the crippled, the criminal and the insane.'”
Whether one subscribes to racial-eugenic dogma or economic-eugenic dogma, the result is the same. How wonderful that Canada’s medical profession with all its genetic testings, cost-benefit analyses, genetic-cleansing abortions, genetic terminations, eugenic infanticides, or inductions of labour for infants with lethal abnormalities, gives to Canadians the gift that keeps on giving.
Eugenics … Canada’s vain attempt at the master race.
As G. K. Chesterton noted: “But we are already under the Eugenist State; and nothing remains to us but rebellion.”
