HUMAN RIGHTS, REPRODUCTIVE INEQUALITIES (Translation)

Excerpt from the book "Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits" by Steven W. Mosher. Available at http://www.pop.org/20090123819/human-rights-reproductive-wrongs. The sterilization campaign had begun the previous year. President Alberto Fujimori, elected to a second term in mid-1995, had wasted no time in legalizing sterilization as a method of birth control. He ordered the Ministry of Health, headed by Dr. Eduardo Yong Motta, to focus its efforts on family planning—specifically, on tubal ligation. To train Peruvian doctors and officials in how to design and carry out a sterilization campaign, Dr. Motta brought in Chinese, Indian, and Colombian doctors who had conducted campaigns of this type in their own countries. To oversee the success of the campaign, Fujimori set national goals for the number of sterilizations to be performed—100,000 in 1997 alone—and demanded weekly progress reports. Mobile sterilization teams, a creation of these campaigns, were quickly assembled in Lima, the capital. These teams of doctors and nurses, who often had no prior training in obstetrics or gynecology, were taught how to hastily perform tubal ligations and were then sent to the countryside to carry out a series of one- or two-week "Ligation Festivals." Before a team arrived in a given area, local Ministry of Health employees would hang banners announcing the upcoming "Festival" and would fan out across the countryside to recruit women for tubal ligation.