In the US, white men have long had the power to make decisions about women’s reproductive health care. Those decisions have often been especially harmful to Black women.
The term voluntary sterilization, referring to the choice to receive permanent birth control, arose as a contrast to the involuntary, or forced, sterilization that stems from the eugenics movement.
The legacy of eugenics is still active in the U.S. Paternalistic attitudes and policies on the reproductive agency of disabled people is one way it manifests.
Research suggests that expanded access to MAiD tends to benefit people with wealth and privilege, offering them choices and autonomy. At the same time, it puts marginalized people at risk.
Forced sterilization of Indigenous women was a covert part of ‘family planning’ under Fujimori. Over 200,000 Peruvians underwent tubal ligations between 1996 and 2001 – many without their consent.
Smart people can have really bad ideas – like selectively breeding human beings to improve the species. Put into practice, Galton’s concept proved discriminatory, damaging, even deadly.
It may not be legally called genocide, but the impact of the Canadian government’s actions, including the sterilization of Indigenous women, still add up to genocidal practices.
Recent revelations of the coerced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada are part of a long, complex and disturbing history – in which feminism became a fight to keep one’s own children.
Chinese researcher, Jainkui He claims to have created the world’s first genome-edited twins. Such action would pose unknown risks to the lives of these children and to humanity as a whole.