Forced Sterilization Research Articles

The History of Epilepsy: From Ancient Mystery to Modern Misconception.

Epilepsy is an ancient disease, which has fascinated and frightened scientists and laymen alike. Before the working knowledge of the central nervous system, seizures were shrouded in mystery. In antiquity, this disease was accredited to gods and demonic possession, causing those with epilepsy to be feared and isolated. Epilepsy patients continued to face discrimination through the mid-20th century. This discrimination ranged from lack of access to health insurance, jobs, and marriage equality to forced sterilizations. Despite the strides that have been made, there are still many misconceptions globally regarding epilepsy. Studies show that patients with epilepsy in communities that understand the pathology and cause of seizures are generally more successful in social and educational environments. While there has been progress, there is more work which needs to be done to educate people across the globe about the pathology of epilepsy.

Preparing Irradiated and Marked Male Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes for Release in an Operational Sterile Insect Technique Program.

The control of such human diseases as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya relies on the control of their vector, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, because there is no prevention. Control of mosquito vectors can rely on chemicals applied to the immature and adult stages, which can contribute to the mortality of non-targets and more importantly, lead to insecticide resistance in the vector. The sterile insect technique (SIT) is a method of controlling populations of pests through the release of sterilized adult males that mate with wild females to produce non-viable offspring. This paper describes the process of producing sterile males for use in an operational SIT program for the control of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Outlined here are the steps used in the program including rearing and maintaining a colony, separating male and female pupae, irradiating and marking adult males, and shipping Aedes aegypti males to the release site. Also discussed are procedural caveats, program limitations, and future objectives.

Preparing Irradiated and Marked Male <em>Aedes aegypti</em> Mosquitoes for Release in an Operational Sterile Insect Technique Program

Preparing Irradiated and Marked Male <em>Aedes aegypti</em> Mosquitoes for Release in an Operational Sterile Insect Technique Program

Forced or Coerced Sterilization in Canada: An Overview of Recommendations for Moving Forward


 
 
 Between 2015 and 2019, over 100 Indigenous women from six provinces and two territories have come forward to say that they were forced or coerced to undergo a sterilization procedure in Canada. Despite this, government action is lacking. Through this paper, the research team aims to collect and synthesize the recommendations that have been made in response to the recent cases of forced or coerced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada. Through a secondary analysis of data, we outline the findings of a thematic analysis of 162 recommendations from four selected sources: (a) Tubal Ligation in the Saskatoon Health Region: The Lived Experience of Aboriginal Women, an external review by Senator Yvonne Boyer and Dr. Judith Bartlett, July 22, 2017; (b) a meeting of the Senate Committee on Human Rights, April 3, 2019; (c) meetings of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health, June 13 and 18, 2019; and (d) a letter from Bill Casey, Member of Parliament and Chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health, to three federal ministers, August 2, 2019. Seven themes emerged following the thematic analysis of the 162 recommendations: (a) Services and Supports (b)Accountability, (c) Training and Education, (d) Legislation and Policy, (e) Criminalization, (f) Data Collection, and g) Investigation. These themes represent seven areas where immediate government action is required to meaningfully and appropriately respond to the recent cases of forced or coerced sterilization of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis women in Canada.
 
 

Novel Sterile Insect Technology Program Results in Suppression of a Field Mosquito Population and Subsequently to Reduced Incidence of Dengue.

There is a steady rise in the global incidence of Aedes-borne arbovirus disease. It has become urgent to develop alternative solutions for mosquito vector control. We developed a new method of sterilization of male mosquitoes with the goal to suppress a local Aedes aegypti population and to prevent the spread of dengue. Sterile male mosquitoes were produced from a locally acquired Ae. aegypti colony by using a treatment that includes double-stranded RNA and thiotepa. A field study was conducted with sterile mosquito releases being performed on a weekly basis in predefined areas. There were 2 intervention periods (INT1 and INT2), with treatment and control areas reversed between INT1 and INT2. During INT1, releases in the treated area resulted in up to 91.4% reduction of live progeny of field Ae. aegypti mosquitoes recorded over time, while the control neighborhoods (no releases of sterile male mosquitoes) remained highly infested. The successful implementations of the program during INT1 and INT2 were associated with 15.9-fold and 13.7-fold lower incidences of dengue in the treated area compared to the control areas, respectively. Our data show the success of this new sterile insect technology-based program in preventing the spread of dengue.

LABORATORY EVALUATION OF BORIC ACID SUGAR BAITS AGAINST IRRADIATED AEDES AEGYPTI

The use of attractive toxic sugar baits (ATSBs) is a new paradigm in mosquito control. ATSBs kill both female and male mosquitoes attracted to sugar feed on a sugary solution containing a toxic substance such as boric acid. The impact of boric acid sugar baits on irradiated and non-irradiated Aedes aegypti was evaluated in the laboratory to determine any difference in mortality between the two groups. The mortality rates from the toxic sugar baits in both irradiated with 50 Gy and non-irradiated groups were highly significantly different, compared to those of corresponding control groups (t=6.916, p <0.0001 and t=6.451, p<0.01, respectively). Irradiated Ae. aegypti were not significantly different in mortality rates from non-irradiated counter parts after 24 and 48 h exposure to toxic sugar bait (t=0.576, p=0.578 and t=0.642, p=0.535 respectively). There was no significant difference in mortality caused by toxic sugar baits between the two sexes (t=0.595, p=0.869 and t=0.169, p=0.869 for irradiated and non-irradiated groups, respectively). The mean percent mortality after 48 h of exposure to toxic sugar baits was 43.3% for irradiated mosquitoes and 38.6% for non-irradiated mosquitoes. Mortality rates were significantly higher during second 24 h period in both irradiated and non-irradiated groups (t=-6.612, p<0.01 and t=-5.278, p<0.01 respectively). The study suggests that the toxic sugar bait approach could not be used within a sterile insect technique program to reduce the wild male population to increase the chances of wild females mating with irradiated males.

‘Sterilisation Must be Done Against Her Will’: Coloniality, Eugenics and Racism in Brazil 2018 — The Case of Janaína Quirino

This paper aims to demonstrate how the discourse of reproductive rights, led by the Global North, is close to a eugenic bias based on population control, and exercises direct influence in countries of the Global South, such as Brazil. To this end, I demonstrate that entities such as Planned Parenthood International (IPPF), have considerable relevance in national and international spaces dedicated to debate on reproductive rights and thereby influence the production of eugenicist and colonial speeches about the countries of the Global South. Applying a Black feminist lens of reproductive justice to the Brazilian context, this article shows how discourses relating to the birth control of Black and poor Brazilian women were absorbed by Brazil when the country oversaw a mass sterilisation process under the influence of the United States between 1970 and 1990. I further demonstrate how such eugenicist policies still remain in force in the Brazilian State today, which in 2018 carried out, through its judiciary, a forced sterilisation surgery on Janaína Quirino, a poor Black Brazilian and woman. This analysis shows that the colonial discourse regarding the control of so-called disposable populations never left the country, being institutionalised even by the entities that should protect (and not violate) Brazilian women.

Repugnant Precedents and the Court of History

The Supreme Court’s precedents continue to tolerate many practices that would shock modern sensibilities. Eugenic sterilization, race-based naturalization, forced labor on public roads, the conscription of child soldiers, and the exclusion of non-heterosexual immigrants all remain ostensibly valid policy options. Yet the Court lacks standard tools for phasing out decisions that offend our national character. The very societal shifts that have reoriented our normative universe have also insulated most repugnant precedents from direct attack. And the familiar stare decisis factors cannot satisfactorily explain what ails culturally outmoded decisions. Even for Justices inclined to condemn these cases in less clinical terms, it is unclear what qualifies courts to make universalist claims about America’s deepest values. The Court recently sidestepped these difficulties by insisting that one of its most reviled decisions had been “overruled in the court of history.” In substituting rhetorical flair for analytical precision, however, the court-of-history trope threatens to destabilize the Court’s doctrines of horizontal and vertical precedent. This Article urges greater normality in implementing perceptions of national ethos. It first defends the inquiry’s legitimacy by recovering a longstanding judicial tradition of pronouncing specific practices abhorrent to American values. It then underscores the project’s stakes by identifying an assortment of precedents that trudge along as ethical outcasts. After highlighting various tangible and expressive harms that these decisions can still inflict, I propose that the Court integrate its ethical judgments into the existing stare decisis framework. And I challenge the Court’s presumed incapacity to dislodge vestigial precedents. These relics may be difficult to pry loose, but we are not stuck with them forever.

Compulsory Sterilization in Nazi-Germany and Compensation for Victims

Compulsory Sterilization in Nazi-Germany and Compensation for Victims

The Enemy is the Knife: Native Americans, Medical Genocide, and the Prohibition of Nonconsensual Sterilizations

In the early 1970s, Tribal Nations learned that doctors at Indian Health Service (IHS) hospitals were sterilizing at least 25 percent of Native American women of childbearing age. Most of the women were sterilized without their knowledge or without giving valid consent. This Article describes the legal history of how, twenty years after the sterilizations began, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, in 1978, finally created regulations that prohibited the sterilizations. It tells the heroic story of Connie Redbird Uri, a Native American physician and lawyer, who discovered the secret program of government sterilizations, and created a movement that pressured the government to codify provisions that ended the program. It explains the obstacles that Native activists faced when confronting the sterilizations, including the widespread acceptance of eugenic sterilizations, federal legislation that gave doctors economic incentives to perform the procedures, and paternalistic views about the reproductive choices of women, and especially women of color. Finally, this Article describes the long-lasting impacts of the federally-sponsored sterilization of Native women. The sterilizations devastated many women, reduced tribal populations, and terminated the bloodlines of some Tribal Nations. In the last decade, living victims of nonconsensual sterilization programs in other parts of the country have received compensation for their losses. Native American women deserve them too.

The Enemy is the Knife: Native Americans, Medical Genocide, and the Prohibition of Nonconsensual Sterilizations

This Article describes the legal history of how, twenty years after the sterilizations began, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, in 1978, finally created regulations that prohibited the sterilizations. It tells the heroic story of Connie Redbird Uri, a Native American physician and lawyer, who discovered the secret program of government sterilizations, and created a movement that pressured the government to codify provisions that ended the program. It discusses the shocking revelation by several Tribal Nations that doctors at the IHS hospitals had sterilized at least 25 percent of Native American women of childbearing age around the country. Most of the women were sterilized without their knowledge or without giving valid consent. It explains the obstacles that Connie Redbird Uri and other Native activists faced when confronting the sterilizations, including the widespread acceptance of eugenic sterilizations, federal legislation that gave doctors economic incentives to perform the procedures, and paternalistic views about the reproductive choices of women, and especially women of color. Finally, this Article describes the long-lasting impacts of the federally-sponsored sterilization of Native women. The sterilizations devastated many women, reduced tribal populations, and terminated the bloodlines of some Tribal Nations.

Fit for work, capable of being discharged, capable of being transferred

Research on psychiatry under National Socialism has largely focused on the medical crimes of compulsory sterilisation and patient killings. The therapies carried out in everyday psychiatric work and the assessments of their success received significantly less attention. Even under the conditions of National Socialism, the assessments of therapeutic success led to dismissals or transfers within or between institutions as a part of the “normal” psychiatric practice. In the negative case, however, these assessments could also have fatal consequences for the patients. In this respect, it is relevant what psychiatrists understood by “healing” and “remission” during this period, how and in what gradations they assessed the success of their treatments - also with regard to the more recent, intensive somatic therapy measures and occupational therapy. The article explores these questions as a case study using the examples of the university psychiatrists Gottfried Ewald and Carl Schneider, who wrote both textbooks and are known for their different attitudes towards patient killings.

"Saturated with Vice": Angelic White Children, Incorrigible Youth, and Reformable Subjects

This article looks at the eugenic sterilization in the United States in the twentieth century through the lens of race and property ownership. In Kansas specifically, sterilization was sensationalized in the media amidst two events that showcased contradictory understandings of white girlhood in the liberal eugenic era. Sterilization was championed in 1917 after a young white girl was raped and murdered, and then decried two decades later in 1937 when a senator uncovered a (legal) sterilization campaign at a girls' reformatory. I argue that these competing representations of white girlhood resulted from larger-scale societal anxieties about womens' expanding property ownership and voting rights in the twentieth century. Further, I analyze representations of race in the Girls' Industrial School in Beloit, Kansas to show how Black girls in the institution were understood as inherently criminal in a way that validated the ultimate "reformability" of white girls from eugenecist understandings of class and sexuality amongst white youth.

Precarious Lives: Forced sterilisation and the struggle for reproductive justice in Peru

ABSTRACT It is estimated that more than 200,000 women were sterilised without giving free, prior and informed consent in Peru between 1996 and 2000 during the Fujimori regime. This paper places forced sterilisation within the frameworks of precarity and reproductive justice to understand policies that legitimised the violation of women's rights irrespective of the type of political regime: forced sterilisations during a dictatorial regime and denial of access to sexual and reproductive rights during a period of democracy. Through document analysis, this paper examines narratives around sterilisation and reproduction produced by policymakers, political and religious leaders and health care practitioners during these two political periods. This paper shows the continuity of the struggle that marginalised populations face in exercising their reproductive rights in the context of symbolic and structural inequalities.

Improving sterile processing practices in Cambodian healthcare facilities

SummaryBackgroundSterile processing practices in low-resource countries contribute to greater post-operative infection rates compared to high-resource countries. Provision of a sterile processing training program in Tanzania and Ethiopia demonstrated statistically significant improvements in sterile processing practice, a key requisite for safe surgical care.AimTo determine if a sterile processing program in a South East Asia country would result in improved conditions and practice in urban and rural healthcare facilities.MethodsIn 2019, a mixed-methods study was conducted with two cohorts in Cambodia, involving a total of eight healthcare facilities and 43 healthcare workers. Quantitative data were collected using a sterile processing assessment tool and a multiple-choice test pre- and post-training. Qualitative data in the form of interviews were obtained several months post-training.FindingsTest results showed statistically significant and sustained effect of training over a four-six month period, as well as a large positive effect on SP knowledge in both cohorts. Analysis of hospital assessment data revealed an aggregate improvement of 36% in sterile processing benchmarks. While all participants reported increased knowledge and confidence (quantitative), rural participants conveyed a lack of support (qualitative) to implement practice changes.ConclusionThe training course produced improvements in both rural and urban facilities. Findings highlight the importance of informing administrators of the rationale for needed improvements, ensuring funding is available to implement recommendations, and for governments to hold administrators accountable for improvements aligning with universally recommended sterile processing standards.

Esterilización forzada de hombres indígenas: una faceta inexplorada

Este artículo tiene como objetivo explorar la problemática de la esterilización forzada en la población indígena, desde la perspectiva de la sociología política y en diálogo con la antropología médica, los estudios de género y los derechos humanos. Su metodología se basa en un estudio de caso en el que fueron esterilizados hombres indígenas mexicanos, y se complementa con una revisión documental que permitió la construcción de un caso teórico comparativo, a partir de lo ocurrido en Perú, ambos casos inscribiéndose en la década de 1990. El principal hallazgo radica en que la esterilización forzada, si bien obedece en gran medida a una política de control poblacional, en el caso particular de la población indígena, también se relaciona con la militarización que implicó la lucha contrainsurgente, desplegada desde el Estado frente a la actividad guerrillera que caracterizó en aquellos años a América Latina.

Offline: Holocaust education—a medical imperative

As school students in England in the 1970s, we were taught the bare facts of the Holocaust. And that is where we left it. A fact of history, a fact certainly to be remembered, yet a fact that seemed very distant from contemporary times. But last week, the Ontario Medical Association, together with Doctors Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, held a webinar to discuss the case for teaching the Holocaust in medical schools. The meeting was led by Dr Frank Sommers, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Born in Budapest in 1943, Dr Sommers' extended family died in Nazi concentration camps. The webinar also heard evidence from bioethicist Dr Sheena Eagan and Professor Sheldon Rubenfeld, founder of the Center for Medicine after the Holocaust. Here are five reasons why the Holocaust should be considered a core subject for medicine today. First, doctors were centrally complicit in the Holocaust. Their collusion was such an extreme perversion of a physician's professional ethics that this very fact must be part of the repertoire of knowledge for every prospective doctor. Medicine drove the incremental advance towards genocide. The idea of life unworthy of life. Compulsory sterilisation. The euthanasia programme. And eventually genocide itself. A killing project led by doctors. Second, out of the Holocaust came the ethical foundation for medical research today—the Nuremberg Code. The Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg, beginning on Dec 9, 1946, lasted 130 days. 20 doctors and three bureaucrats. Experiments of torture, atrocity, and murder. The goal: to find methods to produce death, not healing. The Nuremberg Code was an integral part of the final legal judgment. The nature of human experimentation was at the heart of the trial. For the first time, the Nuremberg Code set out the principles of research ethics. The Nuremberg Code defines fundamental human rights for all research participants. One cannot begin to understand the moral basis of medical research in the 21st century without understanding the Nuremberg Code. And one cannot understand the Nuremberg Code without understanding the Holocaust. Third, teaching the Holocaust provides an opportunity for medicine to play its part in fighting anti-Semitism. Racism, including anti-Jewish hatred, is a public health issue. Teaching the Holocaust would be a significant act of resistance by the medical profession. Fourth, including the Holocaust in the medical curriculum would provide an opportunity to reflect on the role of the doctor in society. The idea of medical professionalism is based on a moral contract between the doctor and the individual patient in society. But for Nazi doctors during the Holocaust, individuals had no meaning whatsoever. The underlying idea of Nazism was that society was an organic entity where the individual was subordinated to the body politic. The doctor's duty was to serve the body politic, not the individual. Teaching the Holocaust would be a starting point for reflecting on the meaning of science, service, and human dignity in medicine—indeed, the very meaning of a profession. Finally, teaching the Holocaust would emphasise two vital principles in medicine. First, that the value of every human life is infinite. Second, our shared fate. As Robert J Lifton has argued, “We have a sense of kinship with every other self on the planet because we recognise that we all may go down together if we don't pull together to survive.” Genocide. The climate crisis. Nuclear war. COVID-19. These are the shared threats we face together. Teaching the Holocaust would foster that sense of kinship. In Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, Miklós Nyiszli wrote that “it was absolutely necessary to forget...if we wanted to keep from going mad”. An understandable sentiment. By contrast, the philosopher Avishai Margalit has proposed the notion of an ethics of memory. In his book of the same name, Margalit asks whether there is an obligation to remember. And if so, what is the nature of that obligation? He distinguishes between common memory—the aggregate of individual memories—and shared memory, a community of memory that demands action. “Even the project of remembering the gloomiest of memories is a hopeful project”, Margalit wrote. And, “a proper community of memory may help shape a nation”. Teaching the Holocaust in medicine might possibly do much more. It might just be a contribution to protecting all the peoples of the world from atrocities impossible to imagine.

THE DANGERS OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION IN THE U.S. EUGENICS MOVEMENT

This article offers a new synthesis of the role of geography and geographical thinking in the inception and diffusion of the U.S. eugenics movement and its relevance in social and racial sentiments today. This role was supported by the salience of the geographical imagination and the influence of eminent Ivy League-educated elites during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Moreover, the significance here is that the eugenics movement and its geographical imagination transferred into the implementation of policy, notably immigration restriction, anti-miscegenation, and sterilization laws. The geographical imagination provided fodder for xenophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-immigrant public sentiments that left a powerful legacy to this today.

Making the Case for Genocide, the Forced Sterilization of Indigenous Peoples of Peru

Peru’s national health program Programa de Salud Reproductiva y Planificación Familiar (PSRPF) aimed to uphold women’s reproductive rights and address the scarcity in maternity related services. Despite these objectives, during PSRPF’s implementation the respect for women’s rights were undermined with the forced sterilization of women predominantly of indigenous, poor, and rural backgrounds. This study considers the forced sterilization of indigenous women as a genocide. Making the case for genocide has not been done previously with this particular case. Using the normative markers of the Genocide Convention, this study categorically sets forced sterilization victims from the state-led-policy as victims of genocide, considering the effects the health malpractice had on victims’ reproductive rights and the prevention of births of future indigenous populations. In doing so, this study proves the genocidal intent from the state to destroy in whole or in part, an ethnic minority group.

Evaluating the role of surgical sterilisation in canine rabies control: A systematic review of impact and outcomes.

Current recommendations for the elimination of canine-mediated human rabies focus on mass dog vaccination as the most feasible and cost-effective strategy. However, attempts to control rabies are often combined with canine surgical sterilisation programmes. The added value of sterilisation is widely debated. A systematic review was undertaken to compare the outcomes and impact of vaccination and sterilisation programmes with vaccination only programmes. A systematic search of three electronic databases (CAB s, Medline and Global Health) and grey literature was performed. From 8696 abstracts found, 5554 unique studies were identified, and 16 studies met the inclusion criteria. Eight described vaccination only programmes and eight described vaccination and sterilisation programmes. Indicators of impact measured were dog bites and/or doses of post-exposure prophylaxis administered; numbers of dog and/or human rabies cases; dog population demographic changes; changes in health and welfare of dogs, and indicators related to human behaviour change. The studies were contextually very diverse, programmes being implemented were complex, and there was variation in measurement and reporting of key indicators. Therefore, it was difficult to compare the two types of intervention, and impossible to make an evaluation of the role of sterilisation, using this evidence. Given the large number of vaccination and sterilisation programmes conducted globally, the lack of studies available for review highlights a gap in data collection or reporting, essential for impact assessment. There are several knowledge gaps concerning the impact of the sterilisation component alone, as well as subsequent effects on rabies transmission and control. Prospective studies comparing the outcomes and impact of the two interventions would be required in order to establish any additional contribution of sterilisation, as well as the underlying mechanisms driving any changes. In the absence of such evidence, the priority for rabies control objectives should be implementation of mass vaccination, as currently recommended by the World Health Organisation.