Reports being published both domestically and abroad are contending that international aid money from the United States and the United Kingdom has been used to fund forced sterilization in India. The so-called “family planning” initiatives of this kind of First World aid are an attempt to curtail the ballooning population of the Indian subcontinent—a staggering 1.2 billion people, according to the Guardian.
The forced sterilization is being excused in the name of climate control, as a world population that’s gotten out of hand intensifies fears of global warming.
The sterilization procedures are often rushed and unsafe, the Guardian reporting that clinics and doctors receive a special bonus for each sterilization completed, with extra added “if they carry out more than 30 operations on a particular day.” Poor and lower-caste women are lured into the clinics with bribes of ration cards and saris and are then released quickly after risky operations that they had not been expecting. Earlier this month, 53 forced sterilizations were carried out on women within 2 hours, “with no access to running water or equipment to clean the operating equipment” at the clinic’s facility.
Practices like this mirror the United States’ own complex history with forced sterilization and are common worldwide, both historically and in modern times. The rhetoric behind an initiative like this center once again on taking away a woman’s right to choose. It is again about someone thinking they know what is best for a woman and her body; big brother stepping in and determining what we can and cannot do with our bodies and our lives. Whether choice means the option to terminate one’s pregnancy willingly or, conversely, the decision to bear children, it is a fundamental human right, one that should be tirelessly advocated for by women around the world.
For the full story, click through to the Guardian.
Source The Guardian
Image source Mustafa Quraishi for the Associated Press
