![]() ![]() In the US, for example, many new mothers opt for sterilisation right after childbirth, and other women will switch from spacing methods (like condoms or the pill) to sterilisation once they’ve completed their family. Still, that makes the difference between the numbers of sterilised women globally, versus in India, all the more marked.įor women around the world who know they don’t want children or for mothers who have reached their desired number of children, sterilisation is often a safe and effective option. While women can, and do, choose to discontinue other methods at any time, once their contraceptive method is sterilisation, that rarely changes: tubal ligation reversal is both costly and likely to fail. Most studies, including the UN survey, count how many women are currently using a type of contraception. The irreversibility of sterilisation also means that one cannot fairly compare its popularity with that of other methods. Over the last two years the Indian government rolled out Mission Parivar Vikas, which offers three new hormonal methods of contraception, including progestin-only contraceptive pills. Indian officials moved away from setting ‘targets’ for the number of people who ought to be sterilised and began investing more in reversible methods of contraception, like the pill. Today, USAID, the arm of the US government that provides funding for family planning services around the world, continues to support some of this thinking: a USAID-funded white paper in 2014 recommended that sterilisation increase globally.Īfter a forcible male sterilisation campaign when more than six million low-income men were sterilised and 2,000 died, the Indian government began to change its official approach to family planning. His argument was that since US medical advances were responsible for the expansion of the world’s population, they should also be responsible for keeping it down… albeit through women’s bodies, rather than men’s. In a 1977 interview with the St Louis Dispatch, RT Ravenholt, director of the US Office of Population, said that the government’s goal was to sterilise a quarter of the world’s fertile women – around 100 million. The Indian government began aggressively promoting sterilisation in the 1970s, and a number of international organisations and governments were happy to provide support, including the World Bank, the US government and the Ford Foundation. These high numbers might be partially explained by India’s history as the world’s first country to have a department devoted to family planning, which emphasised sterilisation early on. Peru and China also received foreign aid for their sterilisation programmes.īut today, India is the country where the most sterilisations are performed in the world, in terms of both absolute numbers and percentage of the population. And it was during this time that governments of recently colonised countries, including the Philippines and Bangladesh as well as India, would also begin to sterilise their populations, with international support. Eugenics laws in the US would mostly be overturned by the 1970s, but they overlapped with the rise of the pill, feminism and the sexual revolution. Nazis would later use California’s racist eugenics program me as precedent for sterilising Jewish people. ![]() Many other US states passed similar laws. She was one of 13 women who died from the camp. While the government’s official explanation was that the deaths happened due to compromised drugs, a post-mortem report showed that Shiv Kumari had passed away due to septicaemia – likely from surgical infection. That night, Shiv Kumari began vomiting and experiencing terrible pain in her gut. The women were then laid on the hospital floor to recover. ![]() The surgeon cut the women with a single instrument, allegedly without changing his gloves between each surgery. Shiv Kumari and 82 other women lined up in an otherwise abandoned hospital in the city of Bilaspur in November 2014. After she received the procedure in 2014 at one of the Indian government’s now-infamous sterilisation ‘camps’, she advised her sister-in-law, Shiv Kumari Kevat, to do the same. It is an operation that she has undergone herself. Raji Kevat of Ganiyari, Chhattisgarh, has mixed feelings about tubal ligation, the most common form of female sterilisation. ![]()
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