Relatives of the victims have revealed that the women were forcibly taken to the camps by health officials. They were operated on in appallingly unhygienic and unsafe conditions in an abandoned private hospital close the Chief Minister’s residence. The doctor, RK Gupta, who performed 83 operations in 5 hours, had been given an award on Republic Day this year by the Chhattisgarh government for conducting a record number of sterilisations of women. In this case, the deaths appear to have been caused by poisoning by contaminated medicines which the women were given after the operations.
Indian feminist and left activists are demanding:
- Action against Chhattisgarh’s Health Minister and resignation of the BJP Chief Minister Raman Singh.
- A moratorium on the Indian Government’s policy of sterilisation as a form of family planning, and the use of sterilisation targets (which although discontinued at national level are still set by a number of states in India)
- A review of the whole ‘family planning/population control’ framework.
- Expansion of women’s access, through informed choice, to a range of safe methods of contraception, with non-invasive methods being promoted instead of surgery
Britain’s population policies are fuelling atrocities like India’s sterilisation camp deaths
By Kalpana Wilson
The horrifying deaths of
at least fourteen women after undergoing surgery at sterilisation camps in Chhattisgarh, one of India’s
poorest states, highlight the ongoing violence of the population control
policies which the British government is at the forefront of promoting
globally. Far from giving poor women in the global South much-needed access to
safe contraception which they can control, these policies dehumanize them as
‘excessively reproductive’ and set ‘targets’ which make atrocities like those
of Chhattisgarh possible. And while these policies are rooted in deeply racist and patriarchal ideas they are now implemented in the name of reproductive rights and ‘choices’.
Despite its insistence
that it opposes coercion, it had already been revealed that Department for International Development(DfID) aid was helping fund forcible sterilisations in the Indian states of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar in which, as at last Saturday’s
sterilisation camp, poor women, many from Dalit castes, died after being lied
to about the operation, threatened with loss of ration cards or access to
government welfare schemes, and bribed with small amounts of cash, and then
operated on under appallingly unsafe conditions, to meet targets set by the
government.
Britain’s support for the mass sterilisations of poor and marginalised women which characterize India’s population policy is covert – but many of the contraceptives which DfID and its corporate partners more openly promote also deny women control and put their lives in danger. Feminists in the global South and feminists of colour in North America and Britain have campaigned for years against unethical testing of new drugs, and the dumping of unsafe injectable and implantable contraceptives, like Depo-Provera - which is being coercively administered to Ethiopian women in Israel - Net-En, and Norplant.
The Gates Foundation has been repeatedly criticized for its close relationship with pharmaceutical giants, and its role in financing drug trials and vaccine programmes which were found to be unethical and unsafe. These include a clinical trial of the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer manufactured by Glaxo Smith Kline and Merck Sharp and Dohme in India in 2009, falsely claimed to be a ‘post-licensure observational study’, for which 23,000 girls aged 9-15 from impoverished communities were selected and requirements for parental consentwere bypassed. The trial was suspended following the deaths of seven adivasi (indigenous) girls aged between 9 and 15.
DfID’s current initiative with Merck involves promoting the long-lasting implant Implanon to ‘14.5 million of the poorest women’ by 2015’. Implanon was discontinued in the UK in 2010 because trained medical personnel were finding it too difficult to insert, and there were fears about its safety. As well as debilitating side-effects, the implant was reported as ‘disappearing’ inside women’s bodies. Merck has introduced a new version Nexplanon, which is detectable by X-ray, but have been allowed to continue to sell their existing stocks of Implanon. This is the drug which is being promoted in DfID and UNFPA programmes in the ‘poorest’ countries, despite these countries’ huge deficit of trained health personnel. In fact, in Ethiopia, one of the target countries, mass insertions of Implanon are part of ‘task shifting’ where hastily trained health extension workers are being made to take on the roles of trained doctors and nurses.
Like earlier versions dating back to Malthus, current approaches to population are based on shifting responsibility for poverty away from capital and onto the poor themselves. Population growth in the global South is being linked to climate change, shifting attention from the role of carbon emissions in the North, and is held responsible for the escalating food crises generated by land grabbing by transnational corporations and foreign governments. While population control is argued to be linked to declining maternal mortality and improved child survival rates, this cannot be achieved without a change in the dominant economic model which could make substantial investment in health provision possible. But current population discourse insists that the World Bank and IMF-imposed neoliberal policies in which health provision, along with education, sanitation and other essential public services, has been decimated since the 1980s, can remain in place. Tellingly, erstwhile Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell described population policies as ‘excellent value for money’ citing the example of Tanzania which he claims would ‘need 131,000 fewer teachers by 2035 if fertility declines - saving millions of pounds in the long run’.
Today population control is in fact part of a broader strategy of global capital in which women’s labour is extended and intensified, with responsibility for household survival increasingly feminised, and more and more women incorporated into global value chains dominated by transnational corporations. It is this, not concerns about rights and choices, which underpins the policies like those of DfID and the Gates Foundation which deny women in the global South real control over their bodies. Increasingly, women are demanding ‘reproductive justice’, which involves exposing this strategy and confronting structures of power and inequality, as the only way of preventing more deaths like those in Chhattisgarh.
