The mass sterilisation drive of 1976 was one of the most infamous incidents of the 21-month period known as the “Emergency,” which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared the year prior, suspending the Indian constitution. Gandhi justified her decision to dissolve human rights protections by citing internal security disturbances and a need to uplift the underprivileged. She implemented welfare-style programmes, gave land to those without property, and artificially lowered the price of some basic goods to make them more affordable. But these policies, ostensibly meant to help poor people, often included a coercive element. In some parts of the country, poor men and women were offered plots of land in exchange for getting sterilised, or for “motivating” others to do so. [...]
Years before the Emergency, the US government began to put pressure on Indira Gandhi to pursue a more aggressive policy on population control. The Lyndon B Johnson administration was concerned that population growth was a threat to trade and national security, a view that was largely due to a powerful lobbying campaign backed by corporate funders, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Shell Corporation, and the Ford Foundation. [...]
Vasectomy was a safer procedure than tubectomy, especially at the time, and it required less recovery time and follow-up. But Indian men were also seen as easier to target and reach than women were. Dudley Kirk, the director of the Population Council’s demographic division, wrote that, “particularly in Asian countries,” men were “the logical channels of information and communication [who] regard themselves as the initiators responsible for family destiny.” Thus, Kirk concluded, “a programme to motivate men would be more successful than efforts to motivate women.” [...]
More than four decades after the Emergency, the shift away from men during the backlash has never rebalanced. Today, conventional wisdom among health workers in India suggests that men simply aren’t interested in family planning. But some experts think the blame doesn’t rest entirely on disinterested men: health care workers, too, generally focus only on women. The Indian government’s 2017 statistics showed significantly more female than male community health care workers in every state and district surveyed, with especially drastic differences in some areas. A recent study suggests that reproductive health care would improve for both men and women if more male workers were employed in community health care.
No comments:
Post a Comment