Population Control Through Forced or Covert Sterilisation

Are poor Indian women the targets of a high-level conspiracy?

Everyone knows that India has a huge population (over a billion people) and that it has many problems, such as poverty, malnutrition and scarce land resources, that overpopulation causes or exacerbates. If ever a country seemed to be crying out for population control, it is India. And in fact, the Indian government has long been actively involved in fertility and population-control measures of various kinds.

Most of these are innocuous: fertility education, free contraceptive distribution, sexual-health counselling and so on. But there was once a time when the government of India used more sinister methods to try to control the country's population. These included forced sterilisation, bribes to poor families, and other kinds of skulduggery.

The excesses of that era brought a backlash that toppled a government, but failed to eradicate the practice in India of making poor people (usually women) undergo sterilisation by fair means or foul. Indeed, forced or covert sterilisation (especially of women) continues in India to this day – sometimes with the unknowing help of foreign aid donors. As recently as 2009, an Indian politician got himself into hot water for seeming to call for an official revival of the old forced-sterilisation policy.

But some people, it now seems, aren’t waiting for official approval. Or perhaps they have it already.

The BBC reports today that there are parts of India where up to ninety percent of women have undergone hysterectomies. Usually they are told that they will die of cancer or some other dreadful disease if they don’t have their wombs removed. Some are tricked; others are simply not told at all; they enter hospital for 'treatment' and leave without their wombs.

The report suggests that the impetus for this is simply doctors trying to make a fast buck (the operation costs about $200). But something more sinister may well be happening. Even if there is no overt conspiracy, there are certainly many in the Indian government and socio-economic elite who believe the country has far too many people, and that unless fertility can be reined in, society and the economy will collapse. It is hard not to believe that some in authority are happy to look the other way and do nothing when evidence of forced sterilisation emerges. Such evidence is uncovered daily in India, after all, yet the abuses continue unchecked.

Indeed, it is no harder to believe that many of the elite support sterilisation of the poor by any means necessary – and are willing, together with the patriarchal, misogynistic elements in Indian society that regard women as chattels or cattle, to give their secret support to a programme of covert or compulsory sterilisation.

How far up does such support, if it exists, go? And is it just silent support for the freelance population-control efforts of various doctors and petty state officials, or does it go further? Does this evidence point to a genuine covert programme mounted by the Indian government?

I'll leave it to ATS's own conspiracy theorists to speculate whether the conspiracy spreads beyond India itself – whether it is, in fact, part of some fabulous, top-secret global agenda.

Indeed this is horrible if its actually a policy put forth by the government without people's knowledge. We do know that governments will do things like this such as the syphilis testing America did on blacks at Tuskegee.

I hope it isn't true but it wouldn't surprise me if it were.

reply to post by Astyanax


Sustainability of the planet is a concern and so means to sustain the predicted population should be approached and one of those ways is providing birth control to the women and men who want it. I think we should start at least with that. There are governments, groups or parts that will not even take that step.

Unwanted children are a shame and when sustainability of the planet is threatened by careless unplanned reproduction - it is a crying shame and preventable. I think we should take common sense steps now so that over population doesn't grow worse. When you learn how quickly we multiply exponentially - you will start to be as afraid as you should.

reply to post by newcovenant


Its not that the world is becoming over-populated its that governments don't regulate resources well enough. We still have underground and the oceans to stick people, we have the technology to breed all seafood and plants in any quantity we want for food.

The fact that Mexico City is over-populated belies the fact that Wyoming is not.

reply to post by Astyanax


.... not that I would be siding with government forced contraception but it would not surprise me if there were factions toying with ways to limit population growth. Conspiracies say this is why they introduced heroin to the city - whoever "they" are (I guess those same folks we could suspect of managing population growth) and handguns to Chicago.

Originally posted by Spookycolt
reply to post by newcovenant

 

Its not that the world is becoming over-populated its that governments don't regulate resources well enough. We still have underground and the oceans to stick people, we have the technology to breed all seafood and plants in any quantity we want for food.

The fact that Mexico City is over-populated belies the fact that Wyoming is not.

For our ability to manage them - there are way too many people already and some of those resources are finite. When they are gone, they are gone and there is no replacing them. Fresh water is a concern and breathable air.

Why not leave a little space in case we'd like to reproduce in the future and have some open spaces to roam too?

reply to post by newcovenant

The evidence we're talking about here is a good deal more direct than speculative ideas about heroin and handguns, though. Women are actually having their wombs yanked out. You can't get more direct than that.

I thought the topic would have been about in US, like CALIFORNIA and SOUTH CAROLINA, for instance. Those are the accounts of forced/covert sterilization scandals I observed exposed many decades after the fact.

Made me wonder what other ploys will be exponsed in the coming decades. While India may be populous, is it not Americans that account for most of the human biomass, even surpassing the Chinese, singlehandedly as one nation?

Also, is it true the sperm count of north american males has dropped about a 1/3, historically? Whats killing all those spermies?

Now, I don’t agree with the global overpopulation theory. I think most of the food, wealth and resource issues are human engineered. However, I do believe that the populations of India and China are holistically unsustainable for those countries. 1.3 billion people, roughly one sixth of the world’s population, in one nation is pretty far fetched. Together with China are nearly half the world’s people in two countries - roughly 35-40%. That’s not sustainable. India has a literacy rate of 74.04%... This alone can suggest a strain - not being able to find the resources to educate everyone.

I don’t agree with forced, Government intervention. Education and the people’s own responsibility must come to the fore. Why can’t the population use contraceptives and seek education on the matter? I don’t really understand this. The average house hold size of India is 4.8 people. As a contrast Australia’s in 2006 was 2.6 and decreasing.

It’s a complicated issue, but frankly absolutely no one has the right to tell you that you aren’t allowed a child and what have you. No one has the right to advocate depopulation/sterilisation and if they do, then they should follow their own advice and set the example...

Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by newcovenant

 

The evidence we're talking about here is a good deal more direct than speculative ideas about heroin and handguns, though. Women are actually having their wombs yanked out. You can't get more direct than that.

Women have been getting unnecessary hysterectomies for a good long time.

Selling and abusing children - now that's something that gets me even angrier. Many of these places to be born female is worse than not being born at all. I am not sure what the government extent in that is, I think more often than not it is culture and religion.

reply to post by BlindBastards


You don't really have to think about it any more because there are models and they say we are in trouble.

www.oneplanetliving.org...

The only think they don't account for is what may be invented in the future that will solve some of the problems that are compounding as we speak.

www.sustainableenterprises.com...
Loss of thousands of species every year planet wide
Human over-population
Overfishing major marine fisheries leave oceans utterly depleted
Coral reefs bleaching and dying
Depletion of the Earth's protective ozone layer and ozone holes
Global warming
Heinous, drug-resistant diseases (information on the latest Ebola outbreak)
wastes in air, water and soil
Soil erosion and loss of valuable farmland
Storms more severe and more frequent (Good tornado shots!)

www.ibm.com...