Last year, we began issuing materials about demographic policies in different countries. The first text of this series was devoted to the famous Chinese experiment "One family - one child".
The second material analyzed the zigzag development of family policies in Iran. Today we are talking about how the reproductive rights of citizens were limited in India - the second largest population in the world.
The fact that India is somehow necessary to restrain the growth of the population, politicians have spoke back in the 1920s. Poverty, the lack of resources and the lack of a developed and affordable health care system, led to the fact that this state was the first of the developing countries that officially decided the reproductive policy in 1952 (although the famous political figure of India Mahatma Gandhi was always played against state regulation of reproductive rights, But he was killed in 1948).
One of the postulates of this political doctrine was the statement that each family itself has the right to decide how many children will be in it. As a method of contraception, the calendar method was secretly recommended (which, as we know today, is far from the most efficient, but there were no money to other methods).
Twenty years later, heavier artillery went to move. The country began to receive funds for the formation of reproductive policies from "foreign partners" - the influence of the Ford Foundation was a special role.
In 1976, the Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, said that the state should reduce the birth rate by any means - and that the sake of rescue the nation could limit people in their personal rights. As a result, 6.5 million Indian men underwent forced vasectomy.
Just imagine: At night, they break into the house at night, twist you in a shock and carry in an incomprehensible direction into a poorly equipped operating center.
According to the official version, vasectomy should be subjected to only men who have already become fathers at least two children, but in reality, this punitive medical practice has been applied to idle young men who had opposition political views. The program forced vasectomy forced many citizens to stop supporting the Gandhi political course. The politician decided that it is time to switch to women to determine demographic growth.
As a result, many women were trapped: on the one hand, the state hung over them with its program of sterilization, on the other hand to stop the pressure of the family, they needed to have something to give birth to the Son. Female children, as often happens in a traditional society, were not very considered for people.In the late 1970s, a large number of marital planning clinics were opened in India - women could see here who would like to interrupt pregnancy, as well as all women who were willing to pass sterilization or insert intrauterine spiral. Moreover, women were very poorly informed about the side effects, refused to remove the spiral, if for some reason she delivered too much discomfort to the woman - which in the end led to the fact that many tried to extract intrauterine spirals with appropriate ways and applied even more damage to their health.
Posters began to appear on the streets: "A happy family is a small family."
The goals for reproductive politics established on the five-year period of 1985-1990 were such: sterilize at least 31 million women and establish an intrauterine spiral for another 25 million.
These procedures were held, let's say in a voluntary and compulsory order: women did not take away from the house at night and were not taken to operations, but they were inclined to these procedures, providing pressure on the family - they received monetary compensation for passing sterilization.
For such a large-scale national campaign in the country, special sterilization camps were launched, in which complete antisanitarian reigned (and they were prohibited only in 2016).
Often, women were collected simply in the assembly halls of schools, forced to go to the floor, and then a gynecologist came to the hall and spent their sterilization.
Sarita Barpanda, an activist of one human rights organization, adds that some gynecologists did not even have special tools for sterilization and were forced to use cycling pumps for operation (and someone else thinks hell is he in heaven, and not on earth). In the news frequently transferred about the death of women after passing sterilization in unsanitary conditions - the challenge of 15 women in the north of Chhattisharcha became the sign.
In 1991, Director Dipa Dunray released a documentary about the sterilization of women in India called "it looks like a war." Watch it is very hard: on some frames we see how women fall on the operation in the crowded hall, and instead of painkillers, someone from the accompanying just gives them in the most terrible moment to bite their hand. And on the next frames, the gynecologist proudly says that he spent 45 minutes on the first such operation in his life, and now performs it in 45 seconds.
The heroine of the film, which was interviewed by Darray, sincerely talk about how their life has changed after the advent of menstruation: "When we have monthly periods, we gain an incredible strength - the power to give birth to a child. There are no men of this force. Therefore, they came up with all these prohibitions: do not touch during menstruation, do not touch something, do not come to the kitchen. "
Another heroine who lost four children during the life says: "Children are our main resource, we have no other wealth." Anyone who lives in poverty cannot be sure that their children will live to adult age - for medical care often just missing money. Therefore, women want to give birth again and again, in the hope that at least someone from the children grows and can help them.
Today, reproductive policies in India varies greatly in different regions. Some Indian states accepted restrictions and allow families to have only two children (which often leads to selective abortions, if the couple finds out that the girl is waiting), and all who have more than two children are not allowed to public service.
Using not the most humane measures for demographic control, India really managed to achieve a decline in statistics: if in 1966 each woman gave birth on average 5.7 children, then in 2009 this figure fell to 2.7, and currently is at about 2.2 (although indicators Pretty much difference from state to state). The target for 2025 is to bring the fertility rate to 2.1. What price? Female sterilization still remains the most common method of contraception in the country.
According to the organization Privacy International, a big problem in the demographic policy of India is the lack of adequate sexual education (only 25% of the population ever visited some such classes).
When contacting state-owned family planning, women and men immediately offer permanent methods of contraception. No one explains them that in the modern world there are different types of protection that each method has its advantages and cons. As a result, it turns out that still families are actually forced to decide who of the spouses will be sent for sterilization or vasectomy. But at the same time, vasectomy is rather stigmatized in the country after the political course Indira Gandhi and many men now refuse this procedure, because they believe that they will lose their masculinity.
Therefore, women are most often sent to the operation. And yet, the organization Privacy International sees the light at the end of the tunnel: due to the spread of digital technologies, there was a chance that information about different methods of contraception will still be transferred to the population, even in the poorest areas of the country.
Made in India: a boom of commercial surrogate motherhood and his ban
Another painful topic in the history of the reproductive policy of India was commercial surrogate motherhood, a long time not regulated by law. Especially popular surrogate tourism in this country became in the 2000s for childless couples from North America and Western Europe.
The procedure itself was significantly cheaper than in other countries, and Indian surrogate agencies began to appear as mushrooms. Often, managers were deceived by their Western customers, speaking that the surrogate mother will receive for their "work" a more significant amount, and in fact, for the tooling of the child, it was paid only two thousand dollars. Similar details are fairly detailed in the documentary "Made in India" Rebecca Himovitz and Vaisali Singh.
Many human rights organizations attracted attention to the problems of surrogate maternity in India: cases were known when surrogate mothers died during pregnancy, because they were not provided with proper medical care. In the news, the same and case appeared headers about surrogate farms - reproductive clinics, which were locked by surrogate mothers inside the building for the entire pregnancy time until childbirth. Legal problems with the export of newborns are also not rare.
International and internal criticism increased, and as a result in 2015, commercial surrogate motherhood was completely prohibited by law. In 2016, the rules changed a little again: childless married couples from India, which together for more than five years have allowed to use altruistic surrogate motherhood technology. A few years later, this procedure was allowed to carry out lonely women who would like to have children, but cannot do this in medical records.
As far as such surrogate motherhood is indeed altruistic, it is difficult to say: it is impossible to completely exclude such an opportunity that the money of the surrogate mother is transmitted in the envelope. But the mass exploitation of Indian women as machines for the production of children for childless couples from developed countries still stopped.
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