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Alberta stopped its eugenics sterilization program three decades ago, but the practice of "newgenics" is still rampant, a conference heard Saturday.
"Eugenics is by no means a dead issue," Nicola Fairbrother said Saturday morning during the conference in the downtown Stanley A. Milner Library.
"Post 1972, the sterilization boards were dismantled and the sort of architecture in provincial government that dictated how people were sterilized was removed, but then new forms of eugenics really emerged."
Fairbrother was one of a series of speakers at the two-day conference called Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada. It is part of a project headed by University of Alberta philosophy professor Rob Wilson to better document the history of eugenics in the West.
In 1928, Alberta introduced the Sexual Sterilization Act, which allowed surgical sterilization of people deemed to be mentally defective. The policy remained in place in Alberta until 1972. Nearly 5,000 people came before the Eugenics Board and about 2,800 were sterilized.
Leilani Muir, 66, calls it "a very black history."
Muir was awarded $750,000 by an Alberta court in 1996...