This exhibit will define eugenics and the effects of the Alberta Sterilization Act of 1928, focusing on personal cases from patients who attended the Red Deer Provincial Training for the Mentally Defective institution during the years of 1928-1977, while also highlighting Canada’s failed attempt to eliminate mental and physical disabilities through sterilization.
The Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act, established in 1928 focused on the concept of negative eugenics. According to Canadian Psychology negative eugenics is, “the practice of compulsory sterilization, referring to the breeding out of certain characteristics in the population.” [1] The idea of this act was to create a facility to practice the sterilization of feeble-minded individuals, or children of individuals who voluntarily brought their kids to try and rid their disability for future generations. Through a selection system conducted by a panel, feeble minded individuals were deemed to be either sterilized or non-sterilized based on insufficient pre-screening and testing as well as consent.
This exhibit will demonstrate through personal cases, photographs, legislation and newspaper articles how The Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act of 1928 was detrimental in Canadian history, arguing that this sterilization act fostered debate between individual and collective rights amongst individuals with disabilities or racial minorities. More specifically, this exhibit will define eugenics and the effects of the Alberta Sterilization Act of 1928, focusing on personal cases from patients who attended the Red Deer Provincial Training for the Mentally Defective through the years of 1928-1977, while also highlighting Canada’s failed attempt to eliminate mental and physical disabilities through sterilization.
Finally, viewers of this exhibit will be exposed to the negative impacts of eugenics within Canada, and how Canada tried but failed in irradicating disabilities within children, compromising individual rights and freedoms and essentially leaving individuals left to deal with the consequences later in life. Academic journal article written in the Journal of Peace and Psychology states that there is a “larger eugenics movement in Canada and the legal application of “negative” eugenics, which compromises individual rights under the guise of the collective betterment of society through science,”[2]essentially arguing that eugenics within Canada was noted as a science experiment for the goal of bettering society by phasing out certain disabilities, however failing to demonstrate the proper practices of selection and if this experiment did irradicate disabilities for future generations.
[1] Moss, E. L., Stam, H. J. & Kattevilder, D. “From Suffrage to Sterilization,” 105
[2] McCavitt, C.M. “Eugenics and Human Rights in Canada: The Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act of 1928,” 362.