Sterilisation

Abstract

The initial meaning of sterile, from the Latin sterilis, was “unfruitful, barren, empty, bare”, and applied to a female animal unable to conceive and bear offspring. When fecundity was valued, the idea of doing something to render a fertile woman permanently sterile was not readily conceived of, and certainly not seen as desirable. Infertility was stigmatised or at best pitied. The idea of sterility as potentially desirable only emerged with the rise of bacteriology and the practices of antisepsis and asepsis. A sterile instrument or environment had undergone a process to ensure that no dangerous microorganisms could proliferate. So something that had been sterilised became a good thing, conducive to health and the economic benefit of society. This new meaning coincided with the rise of eugenic anxieties in many developed countries in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Increasingly, sterilisation came to be regarded as a clean and efficient way to arrest the proliferation of undesirable human stock. At the start of the 20th century, sterilisation fitted with new notions of hygiene and the promotion of health and was associated with practices that involved greater community intervention into individual lives. Of course, sterilisation also had a darker side, because of the way it could be used to control vulnerable or marginalised groups in society. Rendering a person “unable to reproduce” was often conflated with rendering them “asexual”, and the process was seized on by some as a punitive measure for the morally corrupt or would-be corrupting. Such negative features of sterilisation clearly emerged in its association with Nazi doctors and with what we would now regard as its unethical imposition on non-consenting patients, especially in mental institutions. Later in the 20th century, however, despite its negative associations, sterilisation has increasingly appealed as a permanent form of birth control. What was originally conceived largely as a measure to be imposed on those allegedly incapable of making rational reproductive decisions for themselves has become, instead, the rational decision of choice. In the UK, it is now the most common form of contraception among married couples older than 35 years. In the 21st century, sterilisation seems to have lost its stigma.