Taking Note
JMB
Sterilization and Its Discontents Late last year, reports began circulating in the Lima press that women in remote rural areas of Peru were being forcibly sterilized. Two women reportedly died...
...While these groups use the rhetoric of helping the poor and caring about the fate of Peruvian women, it is clear that their intention is to undermine all familyplanning programs in Peru...
...According to the Peruvian Medical Federation, Ministry of Health physicians were offered monetary incentives based on the number of sterilizations performed, and some doctors feared losing their jobs if they did not meet their "quota...
...Ironically those, like Rey Rey and Cipriani, who have been the most vociferous critics of Fujimori's family-planning policies, are also those who have most vigorously defended his drastic neoliberal policies...
...have joined the fray, seeking to end all U.S...
...The Bishop of Ayacucho, Juan Luis Cipriani, said that promoting tubal ligation means "turning Peru into a whorehouse...
...t is no surprise that the Fujimori government has implemented measures to forcibly bring Peru's population rate down in order to meet so-called economic and development goals...
...It seems at best ingenuous to have put faith in the idea that an authoritarian, neoliberal government like that of Fujimori would promote population policies that respected the rights of poor women...
...assistance to Peru...
...Population growth must be stopped immediately," concludes the document, suggesting that the most "convenient" method toward this end is "the generalized use of sterilization among culturally backward and economically impoverished groups...
...Conservative pro-life groups in the U.S...
...Some say they were told they would lose their food subsidies if they refused to submit to the procedure, while others report that after giving birth, they were promised that their hospital expenses would be condoned if they agreed to be sterilized...
...Maternal mortality in Peru is 265 per 100,000 live births--one of the highest rates in the region, and abortion is responsible for 22% of those deaths...
...If people are Peru's most precious resource, it is unclear how these sectors justify the continued application of an economic model that has pummeled ordinary Peruvians, increased economic inequalities, and led Peruvian women to a situation in which they find themselves forced to submit to sterilization procedures in order to secure a loaf of bread from the government...
...Several groups lavished praise on Fujimori's population policies for "giving women the possibility of deciding how many children to have...
...While conservative groups profess their concern for the women who have died as a result of unsafe sterilization procedures, they rarely mention the much larger number of women who die yearly as a result of botched abortions...
...In the meantime, this has provided ultraconservatives, especially within the Church, with ample material to launch a counteroffensive against all types of family planning that, if left unchallenged, may undermine women's rights in Peru for many years to come...
...Back in the late 1980s, a select group of military officers wrote a document entitled "Coup Plan"-a plan that would later be put in practice by Fujimori and his associates in 1992-which argued that "the most important problem facing Peru is that its demographic trends since World War II have reached epidemic proportions...
...Congressman Rafael Rey Rey, a member of Opus Dei and until now a staunch defender of President Alberto Fujimori, has accused the government of depriving the country of its most precious resource--people-and of trying to depopulate the Peruvian countryside...
...In recent months, however, feminist groups have strongly criticized abuses in the government's family-planning program, and now recognize that the government is not interested in promoting reproductive choice for women, but in meeting its strategic planning goals...
...Another disturbing aspect of this situation is that several local feminist organizations took Fujimori at face value when he announced his family-planning program in 1995, which he promised would give women "control over their destinies...
...Both the government sterilization program and its neoconservative critics deny the most fundamental aspect of the issue-women's right to informed reproductive choice, which includes not only full access to contraception, but to safe and legal abortion as well...
...Conservative Church leaders-especially of the Opus Dei variant-have launched a virulent attack against the government's population policies...
...True reproductive choice for women in Peru-and all of Latin America-means access to sex education, contraception and safe and legal abortion...
...Two women reportedly died because of the hasty and unsanitary conditions in which the sterilization procedures were carried out, and numerous women say that they were pressured by government bureaucrats to have tubal ligations...
...There is no doubt that Fujimori's neo-Malthusian project sees the elimination of the "surplus population" as the solution to Peru's endemic poverty and the social unrest it breeds...
Vol. 31 • March 1998 • No. 5
