Montreal, in the early 20th century, was similar to cities like New York or Chicago that were rapidly industrializing. The Canadian-born Osler, who had been created a baronet the previous year, was one of the world’s most prominent practitioners of clinical medicine.The Congress opened with a reception and a banquet that was addressed by former Prime Minister A.J. The most notorious sterilisation legislation was promulgated in Nazi Germany in July 1933, under which more than 150,000 Germans, including many children and babies judged “mentally unfit,” were sterilised. She was also a prominent Montreal feminist and social reformer. July 24-29, 1912. Churchill’s view was reinforced by his experiences as a young British officer serving and fighting in Arab and Muslim lands, and in South Africa. Sterilisations were halted in Indiana in 1909 by Gover- nor Thomas R. Marshall, but it was not until 1921 that the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that the 1907 law was unconstitutional, as it was a denial of due process under the 14th Amendment. In October 1911 he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, with new concerns and new responsibilities. The issue of solving social issues was an especially prominent concern within Quebec, and Montreal specifically, at the turn of the century. It was entitled “The Feeble-Minded: A Social Danger.” Written in 1909, the lecture gave, in the words of Churchill’s covering note, “a concise, and, I am afraid not exaggerated statement of the serious problems to be faced.” Churchill added: “The Government is pledged to legislation, and a Bill is being drafted to carry out the recommendations of the Royal Commission.”In February 1911, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons about the need to introduce compulsory labour camps for “mental defectives.” As for “tramps and wastrels,” he said, “there ought to be proper Labour Colonies where they could be sent for considerable periods and made to realize their duty to the State.”No legislation was introduced along these lines while Churchill was at the Home Office.
The Alberta Sexual Sterilisation Act was disproportionately applied to those in socially vulnerable positions, including women, children, the unemployed, domestic help, rural citizens, the unmarried, people in institutions, Roman and Greek Catholics, and people of Ukrainian, Native and Métis ethnicity.The most recent issues of Finest Hour are available online to members. Join to automatically receive a subscription to BOTH The International Churchill Society (ICS), founded in 1968 shortly after Churchill's death, is the world’s preeminent member organisation dedicated to preserving the historic legacy of Sir Winston Churchill. In the United States in 1927, in the case of Buck versus Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, then in his twenty-fifth year on the Supreme Court, closed the 8-1 majority opinion upholding the sterilisation of Carrie Buck—who along with her mother and daughter had been labelled “feeble-minded”—with six words: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”In 1928 the Canadian Province of Alberta passed the Sexual Sterilization Act, enabling the provincial government to perform involuntary sterilisations on individuals classified as “mentally deficient.” In order to implement the 1928 act, a four-person Alberta Eugenics Board was created to approve sterilisation procedures. The new law rejected sterilisation, which Churchill had earlier advocated, in favour of confinement. But the Liberal newspapers opposed it vigorously, and Josiah Wedgwood, a Liberal Member of Parliament, described it as a “monstrous violation” of individual rights. The Act defined four grades of “Mental Defective” who could be confined for life, whose symptoms had to be present “from birth or from defective in mind as to be unable to guard against common physical dangers.” “Imbeciles” were not idiots, but were “incapable of managing themselves or their affairs, or, in the case of children, of being taught to do so.” The “feeble- minded” were neither idiots nor imbeciles, but, if adults, their condition was “so pronounced that they require care, supervision, and control for their own protection or the protection of others.” If they were children of school age, their condition was “so pronounced that they by reason of such defectiveness appear to be personally incapable of receiving proper benefit from instruction in ordinary schools.” “Moral defectives” were people who, from an early age, displayed “some permanent mental defect coupled with strong vicious or criminal propensities on which punishment had little or no effect.”In 1904, as Churchill was crossing from the Conservative to the Liberal benches, A.J. In order to implement the 1928 act, a four-person Alberta Eugenics Board was created to approve sterilisation procedures. In my little book, Anesthesia in Ophthalmology, 1 I have credited the statement to F. Darwin, writing in the Eugenics Review in 1914. You have this strange blend of theory and politics [which] was really just bad social policy, but ended up being packaged in the whole framework of a science.” In 1910, on becoming Home Secretary, he read a booklet by Dr. H.C. Sharp, The Sterilization of Degenerates.