Human Rights and Reproductive Wrongs

Note: The following is excerpted from Steven Mosher’s book, Population Control—Real Costs, Illusory Benefits. When the government sterilization team arrived in their little town of La Legua, Peru, Celia Durand and her husband, Jaime, looked at each other and shook their heads. Although Celia had considered a tubal ligation in the past, she had begun to hear rumors of women damaged or even killed during the national tubal ligation campaign. She had decided that she didn’t want to be sterilized that way. Maybe sometime later I will do it, she told Jaime, maybe in a hospital. Certainly not in the little medical post down one of La Legua’s bare earth streets, with its windows opened wide to the dust, insects, and the smells from the pigs and other animals rooting and defecating in the nearby streets and yards. Certainly not in the middle of a Festivale de Ligaduras de Trompas [Tubal Ligation Festival], as the banner hastily hung in front of the clinic declared, with the doctors in a hurry to cut, snip, and sew their way through a long line of patients.1