Ottawa, Canada — An association representing Canadian doctors on Wednesday apologized to indigenous peoples for harm they suffered at the hands of medical professionals, including forced sterilization and apprehensions of newborns.
At a ceremony in Victoria, in westernmost British Columbia province, Canadian Medical Association (CMA) president Joss Reimer apologized for decades of systemic racism, neglect and abuse.
The CMA, she said, “is deeply sorry for the harms First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples have experienced and continue to experience in the Canadian health system.”
This “racism and discrimination,” she added, according to prepared remarks, “is deplorable and we are deeply ashamed.”
A CMA investigation found evidence in 157 years of archives of doctors having participated in or failing to stop medical experiments on Indigenous patients, such as the testing of experimental tuberculosis vaccines.
Indigenous women were subjected to forced sterilizations and many had newborns taken away at hospitals after social workers were alerted about the babies being born into poverty, domestic violence or addiction.
The most recent sterilization case, in 2019, led to a doctor being sanctioned for failing to get the patient’s approval for the surgery.
The so-called birth alerts that led to forced separations of babies from their mothers, meanwhile, were officially ended in 2021.
Indigenous children still make up more than half of all children in foster care in Canada, despite accounting for a small proportion of the total population, according to government data.
Until the 1990s, many Indigenous people were also treated in racially segregated hospitals, where they reported rampant abuses. AFP
