“Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, Glen Sinclair received word he was wanted in the administration building. Shown into the boardroom, he found the medical superintendent, Dr. Leonard Jan le Vann, and the school matron, with four strangers. There was a dossier open on the table, but it wasn’t explained to him. In fact nothing very much happened. The strangers put a few simple questions to him. Then they sent him on his way. Relieved, Sinclair assumed it was just another test. But, three months later, shortly after his sixteenth birthday, the uncomprehending teenager was taken to the school’s clinical building, prepped for surgery, and wheeled into the operating theatre. There, a surgeon made two deep incisions in his genitals that severed his vas deferens and rendered him surgically sterile. Then Sinclair was returned to the school for another eleven years of confinement.”
Heather Pringle
Saturday Night Magazine
June, 1997
Top: The Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives in Red Deer, Alberta, was an institution for mentally disabled children and adults operated by Canada between 1923 and 1977. Sterilization operations were performed here and the vast majority of sterilization victims came from the inmate populations of both institutions as many of those inmates were deemed incapable of consent.
