Canada: SASKATCHEWAN: Sterilization Cry

For 16 years Alberta has been the only one of Canada's nine provinces to sanction sterilization of mental defectives. Last week neighboring Saskatchewan was debating whether it should follow suit. The controversy was touched off by a report on mental ills by Dr. C. M. Hincks, general director of the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene.

Among the report's recommendations: "There is a special indication for sterilization in connection with physically attractive moron girls prior to discharge from residential school [for mental defectives]."

Then came the reaction. In all Roman Catholic churches in Regina the Casti Connubü encyclical of Pope Pius XI was read: "Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects. . . ." Cried Social Credit League President Dr. Joshua N. Haldeman: "A beginning in reducing human beings to the category of livestock in a barnyard." Barrister Dorothy Greensmith saw a distressing vision: "Girls treated and released from institutions would become the prey of predatory human wolves."

Alberta's Director of Communicable Diseases, Dr. A. Somerville, offered a word of neighborly counsel: selective sterilization had proved an effective curb to the birth of mentally defective children in Alberta, had worked "very satisfactorily."

Saskatchewan's Premier and Health Minister Tommy Douglas cautioned that the report was not necessarily Saskatchewan government policy.