I don't know if I'm going to be sick or cry, this is tragic..........................
India’s Poorest Women Coerced Into Sterilization
By Andrew MacAskill - Jun 11, 2013 7:00 PM ET
Sumati Devi knew before she arrived at the grimy government clinic in northern India that she would be paid to be sterilized.
She didn’t know that she would lie on an operating table with bloody sheets, that the scalpel used to open her up would be stained with rust or that she was supposed to first get counseling on other birth-control methods before giving consent to have her fallopian tubes cut and tied.
The main reason Devi had agreed to be sterilized at all was because the $10 she received -- equivalent to about a week’s wages for a poor family -- would help feed her three children.
“I did it out of desperation,” said Devi, 25, as she lay on the concrete floor recuperating at the clinic in the state of Bihar. “We’re so poor, we need the money. Health officials came to our home. They told us it would be best.”
When it comes to family planning, women are on the front lines in India, which has carried out about 37 percent of the world’s female sterilizations. Government-imposed quotas and financial incentives for doctors mean 4.6 million women were sterilized last year, many for cash payments and many in the unsanitary and rudimentary conditions that greeted Devi. Vasectomies, by contrast, accounted for just 4 percent of all sterilizations.
“This is a sign of how downtrodden women are in India, that they don’t even have control of their reproductive rights,” said Kerry McBroom, the director of reproductive rights at the New Delhi-based Human Rights Law Network, which helped to file a court case against the government last year documenting abuse at sterilization camps. “Women are the easiest prey, whether it is government officials or their husbands asking them to undergo the operation.”
more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-11/india-s-poorest-women-coerced-into-sterilization.html
DO SOMETHING!
| 