Chennai: India does not seem to lag behind numerous countries in resorting to sterilisation as an effective means of birth control. The picture of sterilisation is rather grim and even takes a sinister avatar in China and Brazil where ‘forced sterilisation’ is resorted to crudely control the population.
World over, sterilisation is the most widespread form of birth control. According to 2013 data from the United Nations, over 35 per cent of Indian women who were married or in a relationship were sterilised.
When compared to other countries, only Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador ranked higher. Even China, notorious for its one child policy and forced sterilisation policies, ranked lower than India.
Chinese Communist Party recently admitted to performing 19.6 lakh sterilisations and it does not spare men. A 69-year-old man died allegedly in a confrontation with village officials following an attempted forced sterilisation in the southwestern Chinese province Yunnan last year.
His death exposed to the world that fine is levied for violating the birth control norms. While authorities claim Guo Xingcong (69) consumed pesticide after being taken for a sterilisation procedure, his family members claimed he had been harassed by local officials to pay up fines for allegedly exceeding birth quotas before his death.
China collects 28 billion yuan (U.S. $4.4 billion) a year in fines and charges from enforcing the one-child policy, official figures show. Under current family planning rules, urban families are limited to one child, while rural families are allowed to have a second child if the first is a girl, as per a report by Qiao Long for RFA’s Mandarin Service.
Strongly condemning the forced sterilisation and all coercive family planning in China, Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, says the sterilisations often leave women butchered and maimed, and could be deadly at times. “I first learned of the brutality of China’s One Child Policy by representing a woman who had been forcibly sterilised. They dragged her out of her home screaming, held her down to a table and cut her open with no anesthesia,” she said.
The rates of sterilisation for men in India are far too less and globally, also, male sterilisation rates are low. Only few countries like Britain, Canada, and New Zealand have vasectomies on the higher side.
Sterilisation has a complicated legacy in India as a policy that targeted men with coercion during former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s ‘emergency rule’ caused a lasting backlash.
Kerry McBroom, a New Delhi-based advocate with the Human Rights Law Network, says, “The entire system is geared towards funding women towards sterilisation.”
Brazil and India have also shown declining fertility trends since the last three decades and much of the fertility decline has been fuelled by an increase in the use of female sterilisation.
Sources: Report by Qiao Long for RFA’s Mandarin Service, Population Research Institute, CNN interview, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, The Washington Times, Reuters and Washingtonpost.com)
