ABSTRACT
Through an examination of cases of nonconsensual sterilization for learning disabled persons in Canada and England, this chapter considers the role that law plays in framing the thoughts, beliefs, and nontis that fashion the way we think about bodies, sex, gender, and sexuality. The relationship between the sexuality of certain individuals and the health of the social body was a primary concern for the reformers of the 1920s and 1930s who agitated, with success in Alberta and British Columbia, for the legalization of eugenic sterilization. English law also respects the bodily integrity of individuals, although this has not prevented English courts from deciding that the non-therapeutic sterilization of learning disabled women is permissible. It is arguable that the right to bodily integrity does not trouble the English courts precisely because sterilization is understood as protecting the bodily integrity and enhancing the freedom of the learning disabled woman.
