#forced sterilization

[allthegeopolitics]

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that the Czech Republic violated the rights of trans people by forcing them to be sterilised. Requiring transgender men and women to undergo sterilisation procedures in order to gain legal recognition of their gender identity meant the central-European country had breached international law, the court decided on Thursday (12 June).

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[allthecanadianpolitics]

While a national organization seeks to track cases of forced sterilization of Indigenous peoples across Canada, Inuit women in the North say the practice hasn't ended.  Karyn Couperthwaite, who lives in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, N.L., delivered her second son via C-section nine years ago. At the time, she said she asked for tubal ligation – a surgical process that would tie her fallopian tubes and prevent future pregnancies.  When her family decided to have a third child, she made an appointment to have the ligation reversed.  That's when she said she found out that her tubes hadn't been tied – they'd been removed instead. Her doctor made the discovery while reading notes in her medical file from the surgeon who performed the operation, she said.  "He had to give me news that I didn't have my fallopian tubes left to try and conceive naturally," she said. "It's very shocking and hurtful, and the sting is still with me even though it's been two years now."  Couperthwaite registered with the Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice, a non-profit launched in 2024 that helps survivors and advocates for reproductive justice for First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.  It's building a registry to serve as an official record of forced sterilization in Canada. 

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[whereserpentswalk]

Remember that reproductive rights don't just mean the right to an abortion or other contraception. They mean the right to reproduce just as much. It's only really ever exclusively been the right not to reproduce for cishet, white, able bodied (especially able bodied) people.

When you hear someone talk about the poor having too many children or talking about overpopulation do you understand that that's an attack on reproductive rights (and also eugenics rhetoric)?

Do you consider the fact that many women have to have their reproductive organs surgically removed to be legally considered women an attack on reproductive rights? Do you consider it weird that this is what many democrats consider a "reasonable middle ground"?

Do you consider the fact that many neurodivergent people are put on medication that removes sexual function and essentially chemically castrates them, and most doctors don't see this as an issue (especially when the patient in question is afab) an attack on reproductive rights?

Do you consider the fact that people's wombs are being removed in the American concentration camps that continue to operate on American soil an attack on reproductive rights? (And have you thought about the concentration camps since it stopped being a talking point about an individual politician?)

If you do not understand attacks on the marginalized's right to reproduce as attacks on reproductive rights, than you do not get to call yourself pro choice. Your just pro abortions for privileged women.

[djuvlipen]

The Czech state threatened to institutionalize my children if I didn't have an abortion, later I learned they also sterilized me

Jarmila Adiová is one of many forcibly sterilized women who are fighting with the lifelong repercussions of that traumatic experience in the Czech Republic. In an interview for ROMEA TV, she reveals how pressure from physicians and social workers led to more than one irreversible intervention in her life.

Adiová has applied for the compensation of CZK 300,000 [EUR 12,000] currently being offered by the Czech state and is still waiting to see whether it will be awarded to her. For the time being the official deadline for filing requests for such compensation is 2 January 2025.

Some politicians are now proposing to extend that deadline by another two years, though. Adiová was living a contented family life with her husband and five sons before the intervention.

The entire family was looking forward to their next child, whom they all hoped would be a little girl. “My husband and I had been preparing for it to be a little girl. He actually looked forward to that, he was glad and kept saying ‘I hope it will be a girl and not another boy’, because we already had five sons. I was also looking forward to it very much,” Adiová told ROMEA TV.

“We were a normal, functional family, the children were doing well and everything was fine,” she recalls their life before the intervention. However, their plans were thwarted by pressure from social workers threatening to institutionalize her children unless she aborted her pregnancy.

“The social workers started coming to our home and they were always looking for something wrong, they deliberately invented stories to see whether our household lacked something it shouldn’t. Back then it was the case that if they saw you had more children, they immediately told me that I was ‘giving birth like a cat’ and that they would not keep disbursing me welfare benefits all the time. They proposed that I get rid of the child I was expecting. They said that if I didn’t, they would take my other children and put them in an institution. I was out of my mind with fear, my husband was, too. We didn’t want to do it at all, but ultimately they forced me to do it so I could keep my five children at home,” Adiová told ROMEA TV.

After the abortion, Adiová found out that she would never conceive again. Without fully understanding the repercussions, she had been forced to undergo sterilization as well as an abortion.

“I had no idea that I would no longer be able to have children. It was not until the operation was over that my husband and family told me it was irreversible. That shock marked me for life,” Adiová described.

To this day Adiová is being treated for the longstanding mental problems resulting from that experience. Suspicions that Romani women were being subjected to forced sterilizations in the Czech Republic were raised in 2004 by the European Roma Rights Centre.

The illegal sterilizations were undertaken in the former Czechoslovakia and in the Czech Republic for decades and were most often performed on Romani women. They were subjected to pressure and to threats that their children would be institutionalized unless they underwent the surgery and were not properly informed about the nature of the surgery being recommended to them.

Dozens of women contacted the ombudsman about their treatment and several have also sued in court. According to the compensation law now in effect in the Czech Republic, victims have been able to request compensation since 2022, but the opportunity to apply ends on 2 January 2025.

Politicians in the Czech Republic agree it is necessary to extend this opportunity by another two years. Just like other victims of forced sterilizations, Adiová has applied for the CZK 300,000 [EUR 12,000] in compensation being offered.

Adiová does not yet know whether she will be awarded the compensation. “The money will not heal these wounds. I wanted my sons to have a sister. They took that chance away from me, though,” she told news server ROMEA TV.

She hopes her story will support other women who are fighting for justice: “This is not just about me, but about all the women who went through this. All we wanted was to have families and children, but they denied us that.”

[thatwitchybitchandco]

We don't talk enough about how forced sterilization of disabled people is legal in many states.

Disabled people deserve bodily autonomy as much as anyone else.

[shy-raccoon]

This pro birth we need to rise birth rates now bullshit is fucking terrifying because I don't know what will happen to me. I'm a cis woman with a genetic disorder that is very likely to be passed down and causes visable bone differences. I don't know if I'm going to be forced to give birth or forced to get sterilized. I don't know if I'll be a handmaiden or one of the disabled women sent to the colonies to clean up nuclear waste. Look at history it never ends well for disabled people when the goverment starts looking at the birth rate it will inevitably lead to the government deciding who should and shouldn't be contributing to the birth rate.

[crippled-peeper]

just remembered a horrible conversation I had years ago where a ablebodied transmasc said “Ummm where are they forcibly sterilizing trans people??? I want to be forcibly sterilized” to me because they saw me talking about my fear of forced sterilization as a deformed disabled person. even when I think I’m surrounded by people who “get it” someone always ends up saying something fucking abhorrent to me and it sucks

[alinahdee]

INDIGENOUS WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES, I NEED BETA READERS.

I am going to release a video this weekend at the latest, tomorrow NIGHT at the earliest. I have a script written. I would like beta readers to please clean it up, make it more concise, make sure everything flows well, but here's where I really need assistance:

This is about sterilization. Both voluntary and forced.

If this is too painful a topic for you to discuss, I understand. If you would like to provide insight, personal examples from your life or your family, I would be willing to pay you for your labor.

Please comment here if you are interested and I'll message you shortly.

Miigwech

[johnfkennedaddy]

Here's a treatment for a Victorious abortion episode because who the fuck cares about anything at all anymore

Jade spends a week trying to get people to physically fight her, when that doesn't work she claims she's method acting for a play about harry Houdini and needs to get punched in the stomach.

Tori pulls her aside privately and asks why she wants to hurt herself. Jade responds its not herself she wants to hurt. She tells Tori some guy at a vocal workshop she attended over a break knocked her up and thats why she spent the week trying to get knocked down. She doesn't think she'll be able to get an abortion.

Tori asks if the problem is money because maybe she could help. Jade cuts her off and yells at her for calling her poor. Jade then explains you can't drive after the procedure and she doesn't want anyone else to know. Tori suggests Cat’s brother as a means of obtaining mifepristone. Jade asks her if she's been smoking crack. Tori offers to drive, but she only has her learners permit and needs a sober liscened driver in the car with her. Cat walks in having just passed her test.

They jump through hoops to try and make sure that Cat doesn't figure out whats going on. Until they drop jade off and Cat starts to recognize the building in a joke made to imply that shes been forcibly sterilized (laugh track)

in a state of panic Tori punches her and knocks her out cold.

(beat)

when jade emerges from the procedure it’s getting late she says she's tired from the valium but Tori knows somethings really wrong. To Jade’s protest Tori pulls off, gets them in and out, and tries to get Jade to open up.

Eventually Jade admits her complicated feelings about the whole thing and she makes Tori laugh when she says “I keep feeling like I lost my virginity for real this time.” they laugh together and Jade earnestly thanks Tori for her help. Just as it seems they're about to kiss. Cat wakes up in the back seat and goes “Oh, Jade, how did the abortion go?” laugh track, cut to black.

And like idk Andre, Beck, and Robbie get really into pro wrestling in the b plot or whatever

[rapeculturerealities]

HIV and forced sterilisations: How four Kenyan women found justice

Four women living with HIV in Kenya have each been awarded $20,000 (£16,000) in damages for being sterilised without their informed consent. They have spoken to the BBC about their experiences.

The women fought a nine-year legal battle - and their names have been changed to protect their identities, which were not revealed during the case at the High Court.

"It has ruined my life," Penda told the BBC about the surgery she underwent shortly after having twins at the state-owned Pumwani Maternity Hospital in the capital, Nairobi.

The procedure is called a bilateral tubal ligation (BTL) - when a woman's fallopian tubes are cut, tied, burned, clipped or partly removed, closing them and preventing future pregnancies.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A Senate committee studying a bill to establish a criminal offence with respect to sterilization procedures heard emotional testimony from a survivor of coerced sterilization on Thursday.

"It's like you wiped out a generation," Nicole Rabbit, a member of Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice, an organization for Indigenous women who are survivors of coerced and forced sterilization, told the committee in Ottawa.

Bill S-250 an Act to Amend the Criminal Code (sterilization procedures) would make forced and coerced sterilization punishable under the Criminal Code by up to 14 years in prison.

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[cheerfullycatholic]

At the age of 24, Kelli Dillon began showing signs of early menopause. Her periods stopped. She lost 100 pounds. She began waking up at night in a sweat. It wasn’t until a lawyer helped her gain access to her medical records that she saw what had happened: A prison doctor who told her he needed to perform a biopsy to check for cervical cancer had actually removed her ovaries and part of her fallopian tubes. “How do you possibly sum up this level of pain? This level of violation?” asked Dillon, breaking into tears as she took the stage at University of California, San Francisco’s Pride Hall on Tuesday. Dillon, along with six other attendees, were there for the unveiling of a painstaking project: A quilt honoring the nearly 600 victims of forced sterilization in state prisons who are still alive today. For months, victims and advocates inside and outside of California prisons have pieced it together, square by square.

The more I read about California prisons the more disgusted I am

[crippled-peeper]

doctors that forcibly sterilize indigenous ppl and disabled ppl deserve to go to jail for their crimes. I’m not content with their licensees just being revoked especially temporarily. they need to face actual justice and never practice medicine again

[a-murderous-cocoa]

Uyghurs Genocide

Can we talk how china keeps doing genocide? we need to speak more of world injustices

[tenuousglossator]

16:02==<> Hi.

16:03==<> I work on aides for fellow handicapped cullees.

16:03==<> Send me specifications for your disabilities.

16:04==<> It will give me things to work on.

16:04==<> I hate having free time.

16:05==<> They/Them.

16:06==<> Indigo, Cerulean cusp.

Ooc: heya, its me @trenchgardens-ooc-ooc-ooc-ooc

[coochiequeens]

“Performing sterilization without the informed consent of the person concerned is considered to be a violation of their rights,” the ministry said.

By Sarah Hurtes Sarah Hurtes reported from across Europe, including spending more than a month in Iceland.

Nov. 25, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

Anita cannot speak or comprehend complex information. At 28, she communicates mostly with facial expressions and baby-like sounds. When excited, she washes her hands. When her periods cause cramping and pain, she moans and agitates, unable to understand.

To eliminate this monthly discomfort and ease the burden of caring for her, caregivers at an assisted-living home in Reykjavik, Iceland, proposed an unusually aggressive step. The home’s manager recommended that Anita undergo a hysterectomy, a major surgical procedure to remove her uterus and end her periods.

Eirikur Smith, an official in Iceland’s disabilities office, discovered this plan last year during a routine visit to the home.

“Does she even know if she wants children later?” he recalls asking.

The manager, he said, was stunned. “She just laughed in my face.”

“‘Of course not,’” he said she replied. “‘Why would she ever want children?’”

Forced sterilization, with its history of racism and eugenics, is banned under multiple international treaties. Thirty-seven European nations and the European Union have ratified the Istanbul Convention, which declares, without exception, that nonconsensual sterilization is a human rights violation.

But a New York Times investigation found over a third of those countries have made exceptions, often for people that the government deems too disabled to consent. Some countries have banned the practice but not actually criminalized it. And records show that the Istanbul treaty’s official watchdog has repeatedly criticized governments for not doing enough to protect disabled people. (The United States has signed but not ratified a separate treaty on the issue and sterilization laws vary by state).

The result is that people with intellectual disabilities — mostly women — are still being sterilized, even when it is not medically necessary.

Doctors and experts believe that the practice is rare, but record-keeping is inconsistent and data is often unreliable. Iceland’s government, for one, does not keep a tally.

“So many times, you hear it’s in the best interest of the woman,” said Catalina Devandas Aguilar, a former United Nations special rapporteur for disability rights. “But often, it’s because it’s more convenient for the family or the institution that takes care of them.”

That pattern has complicated things for lawmakers and doctors. While in generations past, governments around the world sterilized disabled people as a matter of policy, today it is parents and caretakers who seek out the surgery — saying they have the women’s best interests at heart.

In Iceland this March, for example, Hermina Hreidarsdottir authorized a hysterectomy for her severely cognitively impaired 20-year-old daughter, whose periods sometimes lasted six weeks.

“I know it’s taboo, but we didn’t do it to make her infertile,” Ms. Hreidarsdottir said. “We wanted to make her feel better.”

Since 2019, Iceland has banned nonconsensual sterilization except in cases of medical necessity. But the law covers only tubal ligation, the surgical blocking of the fallopian tubes. Hysterectomies are considered medical treatment and excluded from the ban.

Neither the treaties nor most national laws address how seriously disabled women like Anita or Ms. Hreidarsdottir’s daughter could ever consent to such a surgery. United Nations standards say that caregivers should try alternative ways to communicate with severely disabled people, but experts agree that happens sporadically at best.

In France, the law allows the sterilization of people with severe mental disabilities under certain circumstances.

“When we say ‘sterilization of the disabled,’ we might sound like Nazis, but this completely ignores the diversity of disabilities, the gravity of certain disabilities, and the distress of parents,” said Ghada Hatem-Gantzer, a Paris gynecologist who sits on a regional committee that approves roughly three sterilizations annually.

Even when the law is strict, sterilization sometimes continues.

In Belgium, it is generally illegal to sterilize someone without their express consent. But one therapist, Anne Dasnoy-Sumell, said she was counseling two women with moderate intellectual disabilities who had been sterilized at their parents’ insistence recently without understanding what was happening. And Yannick Manigart, the chief obstetrician at Saint-Pierre University Hospital, said that he and his colleagues would still perform the surgery if parents request it and doctors, after consulting with hospital psychologists, deem it in a woman’s best interest.

In Iceland, Mr. Smith, whose sister has Down syndrome, was particularly frustrated with Anita’s case. Notes by his colleagues show that caregivers had not tried a hormonal intrauterine device, or IUD, which can shorten periods.

“They proposed hysterectomy without consent or conversation,” one of Mr. Smith’s colleagues wrote. A Times reporter visited Anita’s home several times, observed her and reviewed records related to her case, which refer only to her first name.

After Mr. Smith intervened, the home’s manager stopped pursuing the surgery.

Iceland, like its Nordic neighbors, has a dark history in this area. In 1938, the country began a policy of sterilization and abortion for people its law called “feebleminded.” Such policies have long since been abandoned and Iceland is now a leading voice on human rights issues. The country’s Ministry of Health said it had tightened its sterilization laws over the years with the treaties in mind, and would continue to do so.

“Performing sterilization without the informed consent of the person concerned is considered to be a violation of their rights,” the ministry said.

Still, Mr. Smith said he had seen other cases like Anita’s recently. The hardest to spot, he said, involved parents and doctors who pressured disabled women to consent. “Not necessarily for eugenic purposes,” he said, “but still definitely to control and affect their sexual and reproductive health.”

For him, this issue is simple. A woman does not lose her human rights because she is disabled or has long periods.

But he acknowledges that he is hardly unbiased. His sister, Kristin, was sterilized at their mother’s insistence.

“She gave her written consent,” Mr. Smith said. “But she was misled.”

‘What If I Want to Have Children?’

Kristin Smith always knew she was into boys.

As a teenager in the 1990s, she sang along with the Spice Girls and fangirled over the Irish boy band Westlife. She watched “The Bold and the Beautiful” and dreamed of marrying.

She was part of a new generation. Women just a few years older recall comparing abdominal scars with classmates in special schools. Ms. Smith was among Iceland’s first students with Down syndrome to graduate from a mainstream high school — the same one as her older brother.

But she remembers feeling under near-constant surveillance by her mother. Ms. Smith’s mother declined to be interviewed.

At age 20, Ms. Smith said, her mother arranged for her to receive a tubal ligation. “I told my mom, ‘What if I want to have children later?’” Ms. Smith recalled. “But she said no. It would be too difficult.”

It is rare for people with Down syndrome to become parents, and their children have an increased chance of having the condition themselves.

Any talk of children, though, was theoretical. Ms. Smith had never even had a boyfriend. She consented to the surgery.

Ms. Smith remembers her mother taking her to the hospital. The doctor explained that she would be unable to have children. Then came medicine to make her sleepy.

Her mother assured her that this was for the best. And sometimes, even now, Ms. Smith agrees. “It’s a good thing,” she said. “I feel fine about it.”

‘This Is What Is So Horrible’

Mr. Smith joined Iceland’s Disability Rights Protection Office in 2016. Though Iceland had signed a pair of treaties that banned nonconsensual sterilization, neither had been ratified and the law still allowed it for the mentally ill.

Iceland’s health ministry even ran a committee that approved requests from parents, which has not previously been reported. The ministry says it kept no records on how many sterilizations occurred this way. But a spokesman for Landspitali, Iceland’s largest hospital, said that between 2013 and 2017, the committee approved the sterilization of six teenage girls.

“This is what is so horrible: I never met any of the children who would be sterilized. Never,” said Anna Sigrun, a former hospital social worker who said she was ashamed to have recommended cases to the committee.

The committee disbanded in 2019 after Iceland banned nonconsensual tubal ligations. But sterilization cases continued to pop up in Mr. Smith’s office.

Less than a year after the ban was passed, his unit intervened on behalf of an 18-year-old girl with severe cognitive impairment. Her foster mother, with the support of government social workers, sought a hysterectomy to manage her periods. Mr. Smith said the surgery was simply a way to ease the burden of care.

“They reasoned that she would be easier to handle afterward,” he said. The surgery did not go forward.

‘The Best Medical Treatment’

Hermina Hreidarsdottir’s fourth child, a girl, was born with six fingers on her right hand and a pointy, almost elfish left ear. One eye was a lighter shade of blue than the other, but she otherwise seemed healthy.

After a few months, though, Ms. Hreidarsdottir (pronounced RAY-thars-DOH-tair) realized that her daughter had trouble seeing. Doctors said she might be blind in one eye.

“I knew something was not normal,” she said. She welcomed a reporter into her home to meet her daughter, but asked that she not be named.

Finally, at about 8 months old, the girl was diagnosed with two rare genetic disorders. For the rest of her life, doctors said, she would see in only two dimensions and would probably struggle to speak and understand.

With no special-education programs nearby, Ms. Hreidarsdottir placed her daughter in a mainstream school. She dreaded her daughter’s first period. “I knew she wouldn't handle it well,” Ms. Hreidarsdottir said.

At 11, her daughter started menstruating, sometimes for weeks. Confused, she would sometimes remove her pad, then bleed in class, her mother said. Her doctor says she has the mental capacity of a 4-year-old.

Ms. Hreidarsdottir said she tried hormonal injections, but struggled to give her daughter a shot every three months. An IUD failed to shorten the periods.

Dr. Alexander Smarason, the young woman’s longtime doctor, concluded that because she could neither understand nor manage her periods, a hysterectomy would be in her best interest.

“That’s just giving her the best medical treatment possible for her quality of life,” he said. “We cannot deny her that right.”

Ms. Hreidarsdottir said she also knew that disabled women face increased risks of sexual assault, and she feared an unwanted pregnancy. At 56, she could not care for another child and knew her daughter would never be able to.

Decisions like these, involving people who almost certainly cannot give express consent, hang over the sterilization debate. Katrin Langensiepen, a German politician and one of the few visibly disabled members of the European Parliament, is pushing for a strict Europewide ban on nonconsensual sterilization. Many of history’s notorious eugenics practices, she said, were justified as being in a disabled person’s best interest.

But she acknowledged that some parents saw things differently. “They have the deep, strong belief: I need to protect my children,” she said.

At 20, Ms. Hreidarsdottir’s daughter has soft eyes and a knack for puzzles. She loves audiobooks. In March, her mother explained that she would go to sleep and have an operation to feel better.

“I don’t think she understood,” Ms. Hreidarsdottir said. “But we always try to explain things.”

True Love

Even after her surgery, Ms. Smith kept dreaming of romance. She considered trying dating apps, but in every potential profile picture of herself, all she saw was someone with Down syndrome.

Every summer, she attended a camp for adults with disabilities. During those Icelandic nights, under vast skies that never went dark, she hiked, sang karaoke and mingled outside her mother’s gaze. “I felt free,” she said.

There, during the summer of 2020, she met Sigurdur Haukur Vilhjalmsson, who also has Down syndrome. They both liked pop songs and soccer. He was charming and had a silly streak, a contrast to her more serious personality. He made her laugh.

At age 38, she had found love.

The following Christmas, on the beach in Tenerife, Spain, Mr. Vilhjalmsson knelt in the sand and proposed.

They now live together in Husavik, a town on Iceland’s northern coast. They share a cozy one-bedroom apartment in a building for people with disabilities. Their baby pictures hang in the living room.

Some residents need lots of help. Ms. Smith and Mr. Vilhjalmsson are the building’s most independent tenants and its only couple. She washes dishes in a restaurant. He works in a hospital kitchen.

They enjoy road trips, cooking and music. Mr. Vilhjalmsson plays the drums. Ms. Smith serenades him with “Husavik (My Hometown),” a song from the Will Ferrell movie “Eurovision Song Contest.”

They’re picking a wedding date. On Sundays, they walk hand in hand around the port. They talk about their future.

Mr. Vilhjalmsson wants children. Ms. Smith has spent years saying that she never did, that her mother’s decision was for the best. Now the conversation is less abstract.

Does she want to be a mother?

“I wanted to,” she said.

Her eyes welled. She paused, composing herself.

“I still want to.”