Cav's Place

A while back I wrote about women being sterilized supposedly by force, though more exactly through trickery, in Uzbekistan. Certain organizations were in an uproar about that issue as well, but you know that overpopulation is by far the most important issue for me and therefore any measure that prevents births has my support. I did say that beating around the bush and tricking women into undergoing the procedure wasn’t exactly the right thing to do, suggesting actually persuading those few who could be persuaded and using direct force on the rest, and of course targeting men as well as women, but the end result was certainly positive, though still only a raindrop in the ocean compared to what needs to be done.
Now a somewhat similar situation has drawn the attention of certain organizations and the media. At the time I’m writing this, a petition about this issue is the first one displayed in my sidebar by the change.org widget, which really pisses me off and makes me seriously consider at least temporarily removing the widget. I’m talking about women being sterilized by force or through trickery in Namibia. The campaigns started against this practice seem to focus on HIV positive women, but that article leads me to believe that they’re not the only ones being sterilized.

Let me first get the issue of sterilizing HIV positive people out of the way: While I obviously don’t approve of anything that I’d see as punishing people for being sick, I fully support making sure that people who suffer from diseases that could be directly passed on to their children won’t have any before being cured. And HIV is something that can be passed on directly to a child and right now can’t be cured. I know that an HIV positive woman who receives the proper treatment has a 98% chance of giving birth to a healthy baby, but who’s going to take responsibility for the 2%? Are those who support the right of HIV positive women to have babies going to kill the 2% at birth, or explain to them later why are they so sick and likely going to die just around the time they could really start experiencing life? Besides, being HIV positive is simply one more reason not to have a baby at a time when there are already way more than enough of those for everyone…
Of course, a person doesn’t need to be surgically sterilized in order to avoid having children, and in fact a surgical procedure may not be the best course of action in that situation, but the available alternatives depend strictly on the patient. If the patient would understand that she needs to avoid getting pregnant at all costs, other contraceptive methods could be used, as long as their efficiency and safety wouldn’t be reduced when used by HIV positive women. But if the patient seems unwilling or unable to understand that simple fact and is likely to get pregnant if not sterilized, the doctors have to do what needs to be done by any means necessary. It’s as simple as that. So, just to make my stance very clear, anyone complaining of having her “right” to have babies taken away from her absolutely has to be sterilized.
And yes, in this particular situation, if the patients are being sterilized for being HIV positive, it is something that applies only to women. The mother is the one who can pass on the virus to the baby, so you avoid that by making sure that she won’t have children in the first place. The father can only pass on the virus to the mother, not directly to the baby, and whether or not he’ll get her pregnant, or whether or not he’s even fertile, is completely irrelevant when it comes to that. So sterilizing men can’t be justified by the fact that they’re HIV positive, as there’s no potential benefit strictly from that point of view, though of course both sexes need to be targeted equally in order to solve the overpopulation problem.

While a lot of the fuss is made over whether “informed consent” was given by the women in question, which implies that trickery was once again used, it does appear that in some cases the procedures were performed without any kind of consent from the patient. The doctors deny that, but actually if that were to be the case I’d approve of it much more, as I said before. Sure, those who consent to having medical procedures performed on them without learning exactly what the procedure in question entails and what its effects will be are quite obviously stupid and deserve whatever’s coming to them, but I do have serious issues with unnecessary dishonesty, so obviously favor actually forcing the patients to undergo the procedure over tricking them into consenting to it without really knowing what they’re consenting to.
That said, if there’s any truth to these claims that some sterilizations were performed without any kind of consent from the patient, I could actually say that Namibia took even one more step than Uzbekistan in the right direction. Especially when you see some of the statements from the women in question, such as the one who was sterilized after having her sixth baby and is now scared that her boyfriend will leave her because she can’t have any more. That’s something like a bank robber complaining for being arrested after the sixth heist, saying he’s afraid that his gang will kick him out because he won’t be able to participate in any more, and expecting me to take his side over that of the cops who arrested him!

And once again I find myself pleasantly surprised that I have something to write about efforts to control population… Unfortunately, my posts need to be against the actions taken against the efforts in question, but that’s not surprising in the least, as such measures will never obtain popular support. But that doesn’t make them any less right or any less necessary…
Actually, I’m thinking of creating a new category just for these posts and then going through them all and moving those that deal with it into it, as there are now quite enough of them to justify something like that. Maybe someday I will…