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The Saskatoon Health Region has “much work to do” to address systemic problems highlighted in a report on aboriginal women forced into tubal ligations, SHR officials said.

Indigenous women who were coerced into being sterilized in the hours after giving birth in the Saskatoon Health Region felt “invisible, profiled and powerless,” an external review found.

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According to the report, released Thursday in Saskatoon, women told reviewers of feeling harassed by labour and delivery staff into signing the consent form for a tubal ligation, and of health care workers using scare tactics about what might happen if they didn’t have the procedure, including a doctor who talked about a woman who died after having a caesarean section and then talked again about tubal ligation.

Photo by Kevin Hill / Saskatoon StarPhoenix

One woman said she told the anesthesiologist she didn’t want the procedure and the doctor who was to perform the surgery heard the statement but asked a nurse if the patient had signed the consent form — then went ahead without talking to the patient.