Edmonton — Canada's health-care system is sliding toward Nazi-style eugenics by encouraging parents to abort disabled fetuses, a University of Victoria academic says.
In a speech to the University of Alberta, professor of social work Tanis Doe said the widespread practice of pre-screening pregnant women and their offspring for genetic diseases has turned into a system for purging society of the disabled.
"Women are expected to — pressured to — abort pregnancies when fetal disability is diagnosed," said Ms. Doe, who is herself deaf and confined to a wheelchair.
"But minimal support is available to raise children with disabilities. Eugenics was practised in the U.K., Canada and the United States before the rise of Hitler. So what has happened since then is a continuation of the sterilization practices that we have only recently acknowledged."
Ms. Doe said there is widespread acceptance in the western world of the idea that disabled fetuses should not be brought to term.
"In the case of fetal diagnosis for Down Syndrome, about 89 per cent (of parents) in Canada and 90 per cent in the U.S. opt to terminate the pregnancy," she said.
Ms. Doe said that while the rate of prenatal diagnoses of disabilities doesn't seem to be rising, she's convinced that the scientific search for genetic markers for disabilities will expand the range of prenatal screening, increasing the number of fetuses aborted as a result.
Dick Sobsey, director of the University of Alberta's developmental disability centre, said while Ms. Doe's Nazi comparison will be controversial, it's historically sound.
"Genetic counselling of pregnant women emerged from the eugenics movement," he said. "Before the Second World War there was a very robust eugenics movement in North America, in Alberta particularly. But the Nazis discredited the movement, so I think there was a move to a less direct form of eugenics."
Mr. Sobsey said there's no ethical distinction between screening for disabilities and screening for gender — something the medical community in Canada frowns on.
Both Alberta and British Columbia had laws that allowed for the sterilization of "mental defectives" at the height of the eugenics movement.
In Alberta, the law was in place between 1928 and 1972. British Columbia's law was effective from 1933 to 1973.
Alberta has paid out more than $800 million in compensation to thousands of people who were sterilized before the law was repealed.
