"Nobody has the right to play
God with other people's lives -- nobody."
1944 –
When Leilani Muir’s mother put her in an institution in 1955, Leilani was just a few days away from her eleventh birthday. She had no idea she was being abandoned by her family and didn’t realize there was anything different about the place where she was left. She only thought the other children there were like her: “nobody wanted them.”
But the institution in the Canadian province of Alberta existed for a special reason. The Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives housed children who supposedly had mental disabilities. “Mental defective” or “feeble-minded” were some of the terms used then. Ten years later, Leilani left the school and discovered what they had done to her without her knowledge. At age fourteen she was “sterilized”– she underwent an operation that removed her fallopian tubes. She would never be able to have children.
What happened to Leilani happened to thousands of others in Canada, and hundreds of thousands around the world. It was the result of a belief in eugenics. Eugenics supporters believed people with mental disabilities were criminal and immoral, and a threat to society. They believed such people should be confined in institutions so they didn’t mix with “normal” people, and that they should be prevented from having children. Otherwise, their “defects” would be passed on, and that would weaken society overall. So-called “scientific tests” were used to determine who was mentally “unfit.” The science and methods of eugenics have now been completely discredited. The tests were wrong. Many people who were normal mentally were labeled “feeble-minded,” including Leilani Muir.
Nearly forty years after her operation, Leilani fought back. She became the first person to take the provincial government to court over what was done. She did it because she wanted the public to know the cruelty that had been carried out in the name of science and to prevent it ever happening again.
Leilani was born in Calgary, Alberta, on July 15, 1944. Her twenty-year-old mother was married for the second time to a man named Earl Draycott. He was away in military service when Leilani was born, and it’s uncertain who her real father was. Her mother, referred to in Leilani’s court case only as Ms. Scorah, was living at the time with a man named H. G. Scorah. She had been born in Poland, was Roman Catholic, and had first been married at age fourteen. Including Leilani, she gave birth to four children in just six years.
The Scorahs were poor and moved around a lot. They lived on an isolated farm far from neighbors, which Leilani says made it easier for her mother to abuse her. She says her mother beat her and didn’t feed her, so because she was starving, she stole lunches from other children at school. This led to the family being referred to a clinic with a doctor, psychologist, and social worker when Leilani was seven years old. Besides stealing lunches, there is no record from this clinic of Leilani having any other problems or mental disabilities. The records do show, however, that her mother admitted to having a drinking problem.
Leilani says her mother told her she had never wanted to have girls, and that’s why she didn’t want to keep Leilani. In 1952, when she was only eight, Leilani was placed in a convent for a month. Then, on July 12, 1955, her mother took her to the Provincial Training School in Red Deer, Alberta, and signed forms to have her admitted. The school had opened five years before the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act was passed in 1928 as a result of the eugenics craze. The province of British Columbia also passed sterilization laws, but Alberta’s was the most comprehensive and had the biggest impact.
The idea of eugenics began in the late 1800s. By the 1900s it was having an impact worldwide, and its growth was fuelled by racism. There was widespread concern that society was being weakened by an overall decline in intelligence. Some of this was blamed on increases in the number of immigrants and non-white people. They became frequent targets of forced sterilization because they were considered mentally inferior, and people thought if they were allowed to have children their numbers would increase and society would go downhill. White Protestant people of British origin were the favored group in Canada, while East Europeans and Aboriginal people, including Métis, were most often singled out for the operations. In total, nearly 3,000 people were forcibly sterilized in Alberta. Of these, 25 percent were Aboriginal, even though they made up less than four percent of the population.
Leilani would have been considered a member of an inferior group because her mother was an Eastern European Catholic. Still, Leilani was not tested to see if she actually was mentally disabled when she was first admitted to the Red Deer school. Her mother signed some admission forms, and officials accepted them. They ignored a doctor’s report stating that Leilani might have emotional problems, but not a “mental deficiency.” In the institution, she received some lower grade levels of education and got good reports. She was also provided with a few advantages over her home life. Leilani said there were “toys to play with, a clean bed, clean clothes and three meals a day,” and the other girls there were “like sisters.” Her mother had so little contact with her daughter that a school administrator wrote to her after Leilani had been at Red Deer nearly a year. The administrator said, “She is beginning to feel you have forgotten her.” After this, Leilani did have more contact with her family and sometimes went home to visit.
In November 1957, more than two years after she arrived at Red Deer, Leilani was given an I.Q. test to measure her intelligence. Today we know that I.Q. tests were poorly designed and inaccurate. There were many factors that could lead to a low score, even if you had normal intelligence. The test questions were more easily understood if you were white, middle-class, and an English-speaking North American. But if you were an immigrant whose English was not good, or from a different culture, or were poor and had limited experience of North America, you wouldn’t do as well. Those like Leilani, who had been abused, had emotional difficulties, and whose education was designed for less-capable children, had additional risks of having low scores.
I.Q. tests put people in different categories, and Leilani’s test said she was below normal, a “mental-defective moron.” Being placed in this category meant that she could be sterilized. Leilani’s records from this time say her “mental deficiency” could be passed on if she had children and that she was “incapable of intelligent parenthood.” So on January 18, 1959, when she was just fourteen, Leilani was taken to a room and told she would have her appendix out. Then she was given the surgery that also sterilized her.
Court documents show this was just shortly after she had started her period. The fact that she was menstruating is important because it shows that Leilani was then physically capable of becoming pregnant. And pregnancy was exactly what the government’s Eugenics Board, which worked closely with the school, wanted to prevent. In later years, it was revealed that residents of the school were the largest single group in Alberta to be sterilized without their knowledge or permission.
In 1965, after ten years at the training school, Leilani decided to leave. She was nearly twenty-one years old but says she only had a Grade Five education and was poorly prepared for life. She married the first man she dated. When she went to a doctor to find out why she wasn’t getting pregnant, tests revealed the reason. She says for years she couldn’t accept the truth and kept searching for ways to repair the damage. It couldn’t be done. Leilani remembers being told “my insides looked like I’d been through a slaughterhouse,” by one doctor. “Those were his exact words.” Her first marriage ended in divorce, and she says her inability to have children was a major reason her second marriage also ended.
The emotional devastation of not being able to have children meant visits to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist she saw in 1975 said her emotional state was “understandable…the damage done to her self image and to her reproductive capacity cannot be undone.”
By 1989, living in Victoria, British Columbia, Leilani says she almost reached a point of no return. She was considering suicide. She believes her faith led her to a mental-health group that helped her. In the process of determining what kind of treatment she should have, she was given another intelligence test. The results astounded the doctors. They showed Leilani’s intelligence was normal. Leilani was not, as she had been labeled in 1957, a “moron.”
Given all that had happened to her – being wrongly labeled mentally defective and sterilized without her knowledge or consent – Leilani’s doctors told her she should sue the government. Leilani agreed it was time the province of Alberta admitted its mistakes. Its sterilization law had been repealed in 1972, forty-four years after it was first passed. But the public was completely unaware of its victims.
Leilani approached a law firm and asked them to take her case against the province. One other woman did the same, but eventually settled out of court and was barred from talking about it. What the province had done had received no public attention. Leilani’s case would be public, and that’s what Leilani wanted. She wanted people to know exactly what had happened.
The legal papers were filed in 1989, but the trial did not begin until June 1995. It received huge attention as the first case of its kind to go to court in Canada. Leilani says about one hundred media people were waiting for her on that first day, and it “scared the living life out of me.” By now she was fifty years old, working part-time in a cafeteria in Victoria, lived independently and went to church occasionally. She gardened and enjoyed needlework and reading. Suddenly, she was the subject of television reports and newspaper headlines all across Canada.
Over the next several weeks she told the court the painful story of her past. Her parents were both dead by this time, and lawyers for the government tried to cast doubt on some of her family history, including whether she had really been abused by her mother. The government admitted she should not have been sterilized, but said it hadn’t broken any human rights laws, because none existed at the time in either Canada or Alberta.
Trial witnesses included a former member of the Eugenics Board, which had approved sterilizations. The court was horrified to learn from her testimony that boys with Down syndrome, a condition that delays mental development, were also sterilized, even though that Down syndrome males were unable to father children. Sterilization was unnecessary.
Leilani’s lawsuit sought compensation from the province, not just for being sterilized but also for being classified as a moron, and for being held in an institution for ten years without having been properly tested. At one point during the trial, the government offered to pay her $60,000 plus interest on that amount from the time she began the legal action. Leilani was insulted that what she had endured should be considered of such little worth. “God made me a whole person,” she says, and “when they sterilized me, they made me half a person.” Alberta’s offer was “a slap in the face.”
When the judge made her ruling on January 25, 1996, she awarded Leilani Muir almost $750,000.
It was the maximum amount allowed by law for pain and suffering. Justice Joanne Veit’s explanation of her decision was blunt. She said the hurt Leilani experienced as a result of her sterilization “will continue far into the future.” She said she was convinced the emotional and physical damage was “catastrophic,” and she described the circumstances of Leilani’s sterilization as “high-handed” and “contemptuous” on the part of officials. She said there was so little respect for Leilani’s human dignity that “the community’s and the court’s sense of decency is offended.” She also awarded extra money for damages because Leilani’s stay at the school had deprived her of the opportunity for normal development.
Justice Veit did not confine her conclusions to Leilani’s case. She also said the way doctors at the Eugenics Board and others had treated the Down syndrome boys was “repugnant” and sickening. As for those who were sterilized, she said it was obvious much of the early eugenics movement in Canada was racist. She said it was based on concerns held by those of British stock about “the potential weakening of the race by immigrants,” which they wanted to prevent by controlling the reproduction of those they regarded as inferior.
Leilani speaks publicly
about her life so that others
will never share the same fate.
Leilani won a victory not just for herself, but also for the government’s other victims. After she went to court, at least seven hundred others followed her lead and sued the province. The media expressed its disgust for what the public now knew; newspapers said Alberta’s provincial government had carried out “one of the worst human rights violations in Canadian history.” They called Leilani a hero. One columnist said, “Let us acknowledge her bravery, and…her fine intelligence” and concluded Leilani “deserves every penny.”
Others wrote that the eugenics program had been dangerous and wrong, and that “it sounds a warning bell for the future.” Since the ability to test people for possible genetic weaknesses is rapidly advancing, they wondered if eugenics ideas could return.
Leilani was happy that other victims benefitted from what she had done, but said the money she and others received did not take the hurt away, because the government “took something very precious away from all of us.” But she also said all the attention the case received means, “we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Today, Leilani continues to make public appearances, in media and at conferences, to ensure this dark time in Canadian history and the whole story of eugenics is not forgotten. “Nobody,” she says, “has the right to play God with other people’s lives – nobody.”