I'm Lesley Cormack. I am a Historian of Science at the University of Alberta.
I specialize in the history of science in Europe and North America.
I'm presently the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and therefore have a lot of interest in these
big projects that have to do with questions of our past and present.
So, the Sexual Sterilization Act in Alberta was
one of a number of Acts that were passed throughout the 
English speaking world, following the belief in
Social Darwinism and Eugenics that came out of the 19th century.
So, there was a strong belief at the beginning of the 20th century that certain people
should not be allowed to reproduce. And sometimes that was done through
positive eugenics, which is where you encourage certain types of people to marry each other
and have children, and negative eugenics, where other types of people were
prohibited from having children. Sometimes those 
laws didn't go as far as sterilization, but in the case of Alberta, they did so.
And, so they were part of this attempt to keep
the human race from degenerating, that was the idea is that if the 
feebleminded, if those who were seen as less fit,
reproduced, then you would be having a diminution of the
human race and it would be to our detriment.
So one of the interesting things about Alberta is that
while the first Act was not unusual, that that was
very much what was on the mind of a lot of well-educated 
people in the 1920s. By the 1970s, Alberta was an outlier
in still having such a legislation in existence.
No one believed in Eugenics and Social Darwinism by the time of the repeal of that Act.
So I've always felt that one needed to see the Act in different historical moments,
that when it was created, it was for a very specific reason that actually had science behind it.
Not science that everyone agreed with, but science that existed.
By 1970, there was no science to accept eugenics as
anything other than control of people that society
had decided they wanted to control. So, it was already a blot on
Alberta society by the 1960s, in fact.
It's interesting that it took Lougheed getting into power to repeal the Act and it was one of
his very first Acts when he became Premier, was to repeal the Sterilization Act.
It was definitely an important acknowledgment that Alberta was
entering the 20th century, in a sense, at least the second half of the 20th century.
And of course, Lougheed himself had family experience
of people with disabilities; he had a sister with disability and so he
understood it in way that other politicians might not have done.
So, the repeal was very important. Although the number of people
sterilized in the last few years had gotten smaller,
and it might have been that even if it had not been repealed, they would have stopped
doing it because it was less and less acceptable, but still, it was very important to repeal it.
Likewise, when Leilani Muir decided to launch
her suit against the government for wrongful sterilization,
that was important for a lot of reason. It was important, obviously for Leilani
and for her coming to terms with what had happened to her,
but I think it was equally important because it brought out the history of
this Act and what had happened, that so many people were sterilized and
yet the majority of the population, I think, didn't know, didn't know what was happening.
And so, that's what allows those things to happen, when no one knows.
I do think that it's important to learn about eugenics
in the education system. I think that it is the case that many
people have never head of this. I mean, there are good historic reasons why we don't talk about eugenics.
Eugenics became so connected with Naziism and
therefore, after the war, there was the sense of we don't do that, it
goes away. And, of course, the reality that the Sterilization Act tells us is that it didn't go away and 
it continued even as it was discredited politically as well as scientifically.
I think, I mean, I'm not sure what the right level for
the teaching of eugenics is, but it probably does need to be in the school system as opposed
to just in post-secondary, that, by the time you get to post-secondary,
to be shocked that this kind of thing can happen seems very
unfortunate, I guess is I would say. So, probably it's High School, probably it's
within the Social Studies curriculum or something like that
would be a logical place to talk about these events in our past
that we really need to understand. That, you know, I think there is sometimes the...
when bad things happen, whether it's the Residential Schools or something like sterilization
through eugenics, we all want to pretend that it hasn't because we want to say we're
better than that. We want to say we now, you know, there were bad things in the past, but
let's just move to the present. And, on the one hand, I don't think we should dwell forever
on just saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I wish this hadn't happened." But if you don't know it's happened,
then how can you move forward? Then how can you be sure that you're not on the road 
to something like that. And, so we do need to understand our past so that we don't repeat it.
So, I think that an awareness of this history is
absolutely fundamental to behaviour in the present and in the future.
That we have a lot of decisions now to make about
what we do with our bodies and our children's bodies and our potential 
children's bodies. We have a lot more options than people did 50 years ago about whether
we will have children and what kind of children they will be and whether we want
to alter them in certain ways? And these are
questions that need to be taken very seriously from a philosophical and sociological
and a historical point of view. Because, just because you
can do something, doesn't mean it's what you should be doing.
And I think that, for me, the message of
the eugenics movement and the sterilization movement is that good
people who think that they are doing good for society, and even for the people
that they are treating, can be misled, can
do things in the name of science, in the name of progress that actually have
shattering consequences. And so, that could happen again.
It won't be the same, but there are lots of treatments or non-treatments
that could be made that we need to think out all of the ramifications for.
I think it's unlikely that there would be this
kind of prescriptive legislation. I think that it's more likely
that there will be...
there will be things available to the rich and not to the poor and so there will be
eugenics by another name, which is a socio-economic name.
I think that the legislation that will be passed will not say
here's this group of people, we will do something to them; it will say: you are allowed to do
particular things that we might not otherwise want to do. So, that's my sense of future legislation.
Yeah, I mean it's very interesting that...
One of the things that worries me about people looking at history in a simple way is that
it is easy to look back in the past and say: "how could people have thought this? ...
they were idiots to think this." And, when I look at the Famous Five,
they were still living in a world in which eugenics was quite legitimate science.
And they were progressive, they wanted a better world and
they were doing it through temperance, something that we now also wouldn't think was progressive.
I mean, we tend to think of temperance now as a very conservative, reactionary stance, but for them, 
they saw it as a very progressive, very pro-family, very pro-women, and I think that
eugenics, they saw that way as well. I always think of this, my
grandparents were very involved in the, what was callled
the Canadian Association for the Mentally Retarded. And my grandmother knew Irene Parlby, she was,
so she had connections to the Famous Five that way. And she was
guardedly in favour of sterilization. Now, it was sterilization 
to protect, especially girls,
from being taken advantage of. That's the way that she saw it, that she wanted
people with disabilities to be able to live good, full
lives, but she saw that as a way of protecting them. And I think, my grandmother was a very
progressive woman and she worked tirelessly for welfare of
people with mental and physical challenges. So, that tells me that it's
more complicated than just wanting to say that Emily Murphy was a bad person
because she wanted, she agreed with sterilization.
I think, you know, disabilities are socially constructed at some
level. And so, we build, we have built societies that
are accessible to certain people and not accessible to other people and
we could build them in a different that would make them accessible to different people and so the
danger with certain populations is that they don't fit into
what, at the moment, we have decided is the society that
we want. And I think there is a real danger to that. I mean, I think, you can see,
and I don't just mean that in terms of physical disabilities, there can be other things, you think of
all of the work that's now being done on the prediction of
sex of unborn children. And that's social engineering
that is now possible medically. Well, that, that's eugenics, right? 
And that produces, that means there are girls not
being born that would be born. We have a whole range of
ability to test for various 
deformities, various limitations in the womb and then
those are aborted, those are groups of people that will not exist. I mean, I...
absolutely. And it's easy to
see why parents, especially in a world in which we have insufficient support,
for parents of children with disabilities, insufficient
support for adults who have disabilities. As a parent
to be, to make the decision that, well, it would just be better for everybody, including them,
if they didn't exist. And those are decisions that people are making every day.
You know, one of the things that I've occasionally asked students in classes is
if you were told that if you gave your child
a drug and that child would be smarter and taller,
would you do it? And they all say: well, of course.
And because you want your, you know, we know that people who are taller, get better jobs,
we know that people who are more attractive, get better jobs, so why wouldn't you want those things
for your child? That's why the human growth hormone continues to be a growing
thing that people use. And so, we're in this
kind of commodity based society, where it really is entrepreneurial,
you know, if you can do those things, of course you would do them, but that also means, if you've got
someone who is less good, you wanna do something about that too.
I think that what is identified as
the optimum state for human beings, really is constructed
within a particular social landscape and so, you know,
in cultures where men need to go to war and have physical prowess,
that's something that is valued. When we have cultures
where we need our children to get top places at top Universities,
that ends up being what is privileged. And of course, 
the reproduction has to do with who can attract whom, which 
varies from culture to culture as well. I do think that
as a society, we are also moving towards a belief in diversity and a belief that
we do need more than one thing. And that's actually very exciting, you know, that there's
been research that has been done on businesses prospering if they have
a diverse set of people working for them, which includes men and 
women, people of different ethnic backgrounds, differently abled. Not all businesses
follow that, but there is growing evidence that it actually helps the bottom line and,
given that we do live in a very capitalist society, I think it's going to be those kinds of
studies that help to bring forward the idea that we should
have more rights for a more diverse group of people.
But, you know, I think in bad economic times, you often find that
it's those interests in justice
of differently positioned people is at risk. I think that, 
you know, there are, at bad economic times, people say, well, we can't really afford bills of rights,
we can't really afford to accommodate people in the workplace
and so, there's never a time when vigilance can be dropped.
