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Compulsory sterilization ~snip~ Other countries
Eugenics programs including forced sterilization existed in most Northern European countries, as well as other more or less Protestant countries. Some programs, such as Canada's and Sweden's, lasted well into the 1970s. Other countries that had notably active sterilization programs include Australia, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Switzerland, Iceland, and some countries in Latin America (including Panama).<26> In the United Kingdom, Home Secretary Winston Churchill introduced a bill that included forced sterilization. Writer G. K. Chesterton led a successful effort to defeat that clause of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. The Roman Catholic Church has been a notable opponent of eugenics and sterilization programs. In Peru, former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) pressured 200,000 indigenous people in rural areas (mainly Quechuas and Aymaras) into being sterilized.<27>
According to some testimonies, The Soviet Union allegedly imposed forced sterilization on female workers deported from Romania to Soviet labor camps. This is said to have occurred after World War II, when Romania was supposed to supply a reconstruction workforce (according to the armistice convention).<28> However, no court decisions or formal investigations of this allegations are known for the moment. India and China have also at various times implemented sterilization campaigns as a population control policy, though only the latter has made any previous overtures towards any potential eugenic motivations.
Czechoslovakia carried out a policy of sterilization of Roma women, starting in 1973.<29> The dissidents of the Charter 77 denounced it in 1977-78 as a "genocide", but the practice continued through the Velvet Revolution of 1989.<30> A 2005 report by the Czech government's independent ombudsman, Otakar Motejl, identified dozens of cases of coercive sterilization between 1979 and 2001, and called for criminal investigations and possible prosecution against several health care workers and administrators.<15>
In October 1999, Margrith von Felten suggested to the National Council of Switzerland in the form of a general proposal to adopt legal regulations that would enable reparation for persons sterilised against their will. According to the proposal, reparation was to be provided to persons who had undergone the intervention without their consent or who had consented to sterilisation under coercion. According to Margrith von Felten:“ The history of eugenics in Switzerland remains insufficiently explored. Research programmes are in progress. However, individual studies and facts are already available. For example:
The report of the Institute for the History of Medicine and Public Health "Mental Disability and Sexuality. Legal Sterilisation in the Vaud Canton between 1928 and 1985" points out that coercive sterilisations took place until the 1980s. The act on coercive sterilisations of the Vaud Canton was the first law of this kind in the European context.
Hans Wolfgang Maier, head of the Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich pointed out in a report from the beginning of the century that 70% to 80% of terminations were linked to sterilisation by doctors. In the period from 1929 to 1931, 480 women and 15 men were sterilised in Zurich in connection with termination.
Following agreements between doctors and authorities such as the 1934 "Directive For Surgical Sterilisation" of the Medical Association in Basle, eugenic indication to sterilisation was recognised as admissible.
A statistical evaluation of the sterilisations performed in the Basle women's hospital between 1920 and 1934 shows a remarkable increase in sterilisations for a psychiatric indication after 1929 and a steep increase in 1934, when a coercive sterilisation act came into effect in nearby National Socialist Germany.
A study by the Swiss Nursing School in Zurich, published in 1991, documents that 24 mentally-disabled women aged between 17 and 25 years were sterilised between 1980 and 1987. Of these 24 sterilisations, just one took place at the young woman's request.
Having evaluated sources primarily from the 1930s (psychiatric files, official directives, court files, etc.), historians have documented that the requirement for free consent to sterilisation was in most of cases not satisfied. Authorities obtained the "consent" required by the law partly by persuasion, and partly by enforcing it through coercion and threats. Thus the recipients of social benefits were threatened with removal of the benefits, women were exposed to a choice between placement in an institution or sterilisation, and abortions were permitted only when women simultaneously consented to sterilisation.
More than fifty years after ending the National Socialist dictatorship in Germany, in which racial murder, euthanasia and coerced sterilisations belonged to the political programme, it is clear that eugenics, with its idea of "life unworthy of life" and "racial purity" permeated even democratic countries. The idea that a "healthy nation" should be achieved through targeted medical/social measures was designed and politically implemented in many European countries and in the U.S.A in the first half of this century. It is a policy incomparable with the inconceivable horrors of the Nazi rule; yet it is clear that authorities and the medical community were guilty of the methods and measures applied, i.e. coerced sterilisations, prohibitions of marriages and child removals – serious violations of human rights.<15> Switzerland refused, however, to vote a reparations Act.More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fujimori's Forced Sterilization Program in Peru
nytr at tania.blythe-systems.com nytr at tania.blythe-systems.com
Sun May 16 13:36:17 EDT 2004
Le Monde diplomatique May 2004
http://MondeDiplo.com/2004/05/08sterilisation
Peru's government wants to extradite former President Alberto Fujimori
from sanctuary in Japan in connection with assassinations in the 1990s.
But his government's eugenic policy, which encouraged the sterilisation of
300,000 women from poor Amerindian communities, has not been mentioned
Peru: the scandal of forced sterilisation
by Francoise Barthelemy
Translated by Julie Stoker
HALLYCOCHA is an Amerindian community in Laguna Pampa in the Andean
uplands, 50 kilometres from Cuzco, Peru. Here farmers till the land using
ox-drawn ploughs. In one of the ramshackle houses lives Hilaria Supa
Huamon, her hands deformed by arthritis; she has just come back from her
chacra, the small plot where she grows corn, maize and potatoes.
In 1991 Hilaria was one of the founders of the women's Peasant Federation
of Anta, which is a largely rural province with about 80,000 inhabitants.
Three years later she became its secretary-general and in that capacity
took part in the 1995 IVth World Conference on Women in Beijing. That gave
her the opportunity to speak to President Albert Fujimori. "He began
talking to me about a family planning health care programme he wanted to
launch. I said: 'Fine, provided husbands and wives take decisions
jointly.' 'Of course,' he said."
Some months later, under strong pressure from the village nurse and
without any detailed information, Hilaria had tubal ligation surgery and
found it hard to recover. "They insult you by saying: 'Do you want to
breed like a pig? Your husband will be angry if you do nothing,'" she
says. "Afterwards they assure you that you will soon be back on your feet.
That's not true. The scar outside heals, but internally healing is slow
because our work is so physically demanding."
She is not alone is suffering side-effects. Her friend who lives in
Mollepata says that she too is "very much weakened" after tubal ligation.
Disturbing facts have emerged from several communities including
Mollepata, Limatambo and Ancahuasi. It was claimed that women visiting the
dispensary for health checks for their children were locked in, sometimes
in groups of 10 or 20. They were told they were to be vaccinated and then
taken individually to the operating theatre and anaesthetised. They came
out feeling groggy. Later they realised they had been sterilised.
More:
http://www.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20040510/001563.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Forced sterilization of indigenous case re-opened in Peru
By Rick Kearns, Today correspondent
Story Published: Feb 20, 2009
(Story Updated: Feb 20, 2009 )
The investigation into the forced sterilization of 300,000 indigenous Peruvian women is being re-opened, according to the Public Ministry of Peru. This follow-up effort was announced Jan. 7 and will seek out the program’s administrators. It had been part of the larger case against former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, who is facing other criminal counts.
Fujimori is awaiting the final disposition of his case in which he is being charged with kidnapping as well as ordering two massacres that resulted in the deaths of 25 people. If convicted he faces up to 30 years in prison. The original charges against him involved other human rights violations including his knowing supervision of the forced sterilization of indigenous women. The so-called “Voluntary Surgical Contraception” Program was enacted between 1997 and 2000.
After hundreds of women started registering complaints during that time period and international pressure started to mount, the Peruvian Congress convened their own investigation which showed that most of the women were tricked or forced into the procedure, and that at least two women died as a result of the operations. Peru’s Health Ministry issued a public apology to the country in 2002 – after the case had received international attention – at which point investigators were asserting that former President Fujimori knew about the coercion and threats.
“…the forced sterilizations focused on poor, indigenous, Quechua-speaking and Aymara women,” said women’s rights advocate Maria Esther Mogollon. She is a member of MAM Fundacional, the women’s rights organization that helped a group of victims present their case to federal authorities.
“The total number came to be 300,000 women and 22,000 men (who received vasectomies). … the majority of whom did not sign informed consent statements and were also subjected to threats, coercion and other violations.
More:
http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/global/39910172.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
RIGHTS-PERU: Forcibly Sterilised Women Gain Voice in Congress
By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Jul 10 (IPS) - Congressman-elect Alejandro Aguinaga, a former health minister during the Alberto Fujimori administration (1990-2000), as of Jul. 28 will have to share the legislative chamber with rural activist Hilaria Supa Huamán, who has denounced him for promoting the forced sterilisation of hundreds of thousands of Peruvian women.
Supa, who will occupy a seat representing Union for Peru - the party that supported the presidential candidacy of nationalist Ollanta Humala - formally accused Aguinaga, elected by the pro-Fujimori Alliance for the Future, of promoting a forced sterilisation programme which deprived 363,000 Peruvian women of their right to motherhood.
The case is currently in the hands of prosecutor Héctor Villar, who specialises in human rights. Sources at his office told IPS that the magistrate is detailing the responsibility of the former health authorities in order to present charges.
When Supa lodged the accusation during Fujimori's administration, she never imagined that her leadership in defence of the rights of women in Cusco, in the south of the country, would take her so far. Today, this poor, indigenous, Quechua-speaking mother is a member of Congress, just like Aguinaga.
Aguinaga said he could not recall who Supa was when IPS asked him about the rural women's leader from Cusco.
"I have just heard that she has been elected to Congress," he said. "No doubt we will have the opportunity to talk. What Peru needs now is development policies and not to keep harping on about the same things (the forced sterilisations), that have already been cleared up and shelved."
IPS told the former minister that a prosecutor is investigating the case and is about to bring charges, and that Supa would propose in Congress that those responsible for implementing the VSC programme should be punished.
"As far as I'm concerned, the matter is closed," said Aguinaga. "We have to take action on issues of importance to the country, like the maternal mortality rate which continues to be high. Reproductive health is the priority now."
Aguinaga also said he was unaware of the status of the investigation he is subjected to by the human rights prosecutor. "I do not know what the situation is."
But Supa is not about to let the past be forgotten. From 1996 to 2000, with the aim of drastically lowering the birth rate in Peru's most impoverished areas, Fujimori implemented the Voluntary Surgical Contraception (VSC) programme. Medical VSC brigades were dispatched to every corner of the country, including the southern Cusco town of Anta, near the rural community of Ollacocha, where Supa hails from.
After surgery, six of Supa's neighbours experienced terrible pain as a result of the ligation of their fallopian tubes. Supa recorded their testimonies, and those of other women in nearby communities who had undergone VSC, and she discovered that in Anta province, the Health Ministry teams were recruiting rural women with false promises or through intimidation.
More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33918
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