Birds Aren't Real

In 1959, doctors in Alberta told a 14-year-old girl they were taking out her appendix. They were not. It took her nearly forty years to make the province admit what it had really done. She was born in Calgary on July 15, 1944. Her family was poor. They moved constantly. At home, she was unwanted, and she was abused. When she was eight, her mother placed her in a convent for a month. A year later, her mother applied to have her committed to the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives in Red Deer. There was no bed free. So the girl waited two years. On July 12, 1955, just before her 11th birthday, she was admitted. No doctor tested her first. The admission rested entirely on what her mother said about her. She thought she was being sent to an orphanage. Her name was Leilani Muir. And a condition of her entry had already been signed. Her mother had given written permission for her to be sterilized. Think about what that actually meant. A child walked through those doors, and the decision about whether she would ever have children of her own had already been made by somebody else. Alberta had passed its Sexual Sterilization Act in 1928. A small government panel, the Eugenics Board, decided who was "fit" to have children. Low test scores, poverty, being Catholic, being an immigrant's daughter, being Indigenous, being in an institution at all. Any of it could put you in front of the Board. More than two years after she arrived, Leilani was taken to a clinic in Calgary for an intelligence test. She scored 64. The Board labelled her a "moron." Her file noted her Irish and Polish background, her Catholic faith, and that she had "shown definite interest in the opposite sex." They ordered her sterilized. Nobody told her. On January 19, 1959, surgeons destroyed both of her fallopian tubes. She was told it was her appendix. She stayed in the institution until she was 20. She had been taught to about a Grade 5 level. In 1965, she walked out into the world on her own. She worked as a waitress. She married. She wanted a baby. The baby never came. Fertility tests finally gave her the answer. A doctor told her she had been deliberately sterilized, and that it could never be reversed. She tried to adopt instead. She was turned down. Her history as a former inmate of an institution followed her into every office. Two marriages ended. The years went by. By 1989, living in British Columbia, she was depressed enough to seek professional help. To see whether she was a good fit for group therapy, a psychologist gave her another intelligence test. She scored 89. Normal. Here is the part that should make people angry. The number the province had used to justify cutting her open had never measured her mind. It had measured a frightened, neglected child in an institution. Leilani Muir decided to sue the Province of Alberta. Nobody had ever done that before. She had no money and no profile. She had a Grade 5 education and a file that called her mentally defective. Against her stood a provincial government with every resource it needed. The case took years to reach a courtroom. The trial opened on June 22, 1995, before Justice Joanne Veit of the Court of Queen's Bench. It ran four weeks. On January 25, 1996, the judgment came down. Leilani Muir won. Justice Veit awarded her $740,780 in damages, plus $230,000 toward her legal costs. And she wrote, plainly, what had been done: "In 1959, the province wrongfully surgically sterilized Ms. Muir." The judge went further. She listed what the confinement had cost a young girl: loss of liberty, loss of reputation, humiliation and disgrace, pain and suffering, loss of normal developmental experiences, loss of contact with family and friends. Thirty-seven years after the surgery. Forty-one years after she first walked into that school. Her win opened a door that could not be shut again.