Big Money Backs Sterilization Camps

A government hospital in West Bengal's Malda district is facing an inquiry for conducting mass sterilization of women and relocating the women to a nearby open field.

Biswa Ranjan Satpathi, West Bengal's director of health services, was reported to have said, "This is inhuman and we have ordered a probe into the incident." 

Staff at a mass sterilization camp in West Bengal dumped 106 women in a field to recover after their painful surgeries.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the British government organized a family planning summit in London. Rich nations and NGOs pledged US$2.6 billion for population control/contraception in the developing world.

At the summit "sterilization camps" were not mentioned, but India's representatives spoke of a "paradigm shift" in their family planning. Likely, some of the $2.6 billion went into the pockets of the doctors who sterilized Indian women at the Manikchak Rural Hospital.

After the operation, women still under the effects of anesthesia, were dumped in an open field. According to the local media, "such frenzied sterilization camps are routine".

India no longer has centralized family planning quotas, but in practice state and district officials set targets, leading to disgraces like this.


Related reading: Australia Forced Sterilization Investigated; Israel's Abuse of Ethiopian Women; Judge Harms' Abortion-Sterilization Order Overruled

USA: Absence of Stem Cell Donors Consent

After President Obama reversed his predecessor's stand on embryo research in 2009 shortly after his inauguration, the battles seemed over. The main ethical consideration was ensuring that the donors of embryos and gametes gave their informed consent to research.

However, a review of human embryonic stem cell lines in the US has raised concerns about informed consent amongst gamete donors. Some of the stem cell lines, though approved by the National Institutes of Health, may have involved gametes from donors who had not consented. The review, conducted by academics from Rockfeller University and The Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank, identified 30 lines of approved stem cells with unknown provenance. These cells may very well have come from non-consenting gamete donors. In addition to this, the providers of 19 lines did not respond to requests for consent information.

The authors of the review criticised American IVF clinics, from which many of the embryos were sourced, for failing to obtain consent from gamete donors: "just 30% of oocyte donor consent forms in surveyed US IVF clinics mention the possibility that resultant embryos might be donated to research, and only 8% mention donation to hESC research specifically" the authors of the review stated in a letter to Cell Stem Cell.

They also stressed that "information about the provenance of the hESC lines should be public and readily available", particularly for the hESC research community. They conclude:

"With such rapid advances occurring in stem cell research, it is critical that consent forms for donation of gametes to IVF refer not just to the possibility of future research use, but also to derivation of hESCs specifically. Also, information about the provenance of the hESC lines should be public and readily available. The hESC research community will be best served if their essential research materials--gametes and embryos --are donated by individuals who knowingly and willingly agree to the use of those materials in hESC research."


Related reading:  Absence of Gamete Donor Consent; Some Stem Cell Lines Off Limits; Whistleblower Exposes Soo Kyung's Stem cell Research; Mouse Stem Cells for Retina Repair

Israel's Abuse of Ethiopian Women

Years of rumours that Ethiopian women were pressured into having contraceptive injections by Israeli officials have finally been confirmed. The Health Ministry has ordered immigration officials in Ethiopia and health workers in Israel to stop coercing or coaxing women into accepting the long-lasting injectable contraceptive Depo-Provera.

The directive instructed doctors "not to renew prescriptions of Depo Provera to women of Ethiopian origin or any other women who, for whatever reason, may not understand the treatment's implications." They should also ask patients why they want to take the shot, using a translator if necessary. The Ministry did not confirm or acknowledge any wrongdoing.

Ethiopians who claim to be Jews are welcome to migrate to Israel under the Law of Return, but they face discrimination and have not always integrated well into Israeli society. Births among Ethiopian women have dropped by 50% in the last decade, according to a report by the "Vacuum" investigative news program on Israeli Educational Television. "This story reeks of racism, paternalism and arrogance. It's a story to be ashamed of," journalist Gal Gabai concluded.

Ethiopian women told the journalists stories of unsubtle coercion and misinformation. "They said, 'Come, there are vaccinations, gather everyone," one of them said. "We said we wouldn't receive it. They said, 'You won't move to Israel.'" Women said that they were told that it would be hard for them to work or find accommodation of they had large families.

This is not a new problem, but the government is finally facing up to the lack of informed consent on the part of a marginalised, poorly-educated minority. In 2008, Hedva Eyal, of the feminist group Isha L'Isha, wrote a report alleging that the medical profession had failed Ethiopian migrant women.

"The paternalistic attitude towards women of Ethiopian origin and the state's concern over high rates of birth among poor and black populations drove Israeli official bodies, such as The Jewish Agency and the medical establishment, to act, allegedly for the benefit of women's health, but in fact according to the concepts and wishes of the establishment regarding the desirable way to conduct family life. As a result, and as this paper shows, women did not get crucial medical information and their right of choice regarding their bodies, families and lives was severely curtailed."

From here.

Israel did offer an apology for the abuse of these women.

Some Stem Cell Lines Off Limits

Stanford University is to tell its researchers that around one-quarter of the human embryonic stem-cell lines eligible for US government funding are now off-limits because of ethics concerns.

The institute, in Palo Alto, California, is concerned that some of the women who donated the embryos for these stem-cell lines did not give informed consent for the lines to be used in research. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has decided to reconsider lines individually as researchers express an interest in using them.

The concerns follow an analysis by bioethicist Robert Streiffer of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who obtained copies of the informed consent forms given to donors of the 21 lines that have been approved for federal research funding by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Streiffer compared these forms with guidelines set by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS). None of the forms met the guidelines exactly, he concluded, and some deviated egregiously (R. Streiffer Hastings Cent. Rep. 38, 40–47; 2008).

Now, ethics oversight committees at universities across the United States are questioning which lines should be permissible for research — and hoping that another agency, such as the NIH or a state government, will make the decision for them.

Read it all here.