Ericka Dyck and Maureen Lux, Challenging Choices

Authors Ericka Dyck and Maureen Lux examine the awkward alliance of eugenics, population control and birth control in relation to four groups—Indigenous women, persons with intellectual disabilities, men and teen girls—in the 1970s. During this decade, Malthusian-influenced fears of overpopulation in the Global South led to the repurposing of birth control in the Global North. Certainly, late twentieth-century anxiety over a population explosion was a major factor in the liberalisation of Canada’s birth control laws in 1969, just as eugenically driven concerns over race suicide in the early twentieth century had led to the promulgation of coercive sterilisation laws in the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. Nazi Germany’s catalogue of horrors challenged the eugenics movement. However, the long shadow that eugenics cast, even in provinces that did not pass coercive sterilization laws explains why, in a country with a large land mass and a small population, the prospect of

Birth control · Criminology · Development economics · Economics · Eugenics · Family planning · Indigenous · Overpopulation · Political science · Population · Shadow (psychology · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Medical History and Research · Psychology · Demography · Law