U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, after participating in an abortion rights sit-in on July 19, 2022, in Washington.
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In the US, white men have long had the power to make decisions about women’s reproductive health care. Those decisions have often been especially harmful to Black women.
Conversations between patients and their doctors about permanent birth control procedures can at times be fraught and influenced by long-standing stigmas.
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The term voluntary sterilization, referring to the choice to receive permanent birth control, arose as a contrast to the involuntary, or forced, sterilization that stems from the eugenics movement.
Britney Spears was forced to continue wearing an IUD under her conservatorship.
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The legacy of eugenics is still active in the U.S. Paternalistic attitudes and policies on the reproductive agency of disabled people is one way it manifests.
Originally, medical assistance in dying was intended for people who were terminally ill and whose death was foreseeable.
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Research suggests that expanded access to MAiD tends to benefit people with wealth and privilege, offering them choices and autonomy. At the same time, it puts marginalized people at risk.
Victims of forced sterilizations protest in Lima, Peru, in 2014. Public hearings to uncover this dark chapter of the Fujimori dictatorship began in January.
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Forced sterilization of Indigenous women was a covert part of ‘family planning’ under Fujimori. Over 200,000 Peruvians underwent tubal ligations between 1996 and 2001 – many without their consent.
A man of genius – but his ideas were not to the benefit of all humankind.
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Smart people can have really bad ideas – like selectively breeding human beings to improve the species. Put into practice, Galton’s concept proved discriminatory, damaging, even deadly.
Dawn Wooten, left, a nurse at Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Ga., speaks at a news conference in Atlanta protesting conditions at the immigration centre.
(AP Photo/Jeff Amy)
The US has a long history of forced sterilization campaigns that were driven by the bogus ‘science’ of eugenics, racism and sexism.
The recent maternal health crisis of tennis player Serena Williams was a flash point for many health professionals. A photo of Williams with her daughter from her Instagram account.
Instagram/SerenaWilliams
As we celebrate moms this Mother’s Day, let’s remember that maternal health is a right that many do not enjoy.
Senator Yvonne Boyer, a Metis lawyer and former nurse called tubal ligations carried out on unwilling Indigenous women one of the “most heinous” practices in health care happening across Canada.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
It may not be legally called genocide, but the impact of the Canadian government’s actions, including the sterilization of Indigenous women, still add up to genocidal practices.
Morningstar Mercredi, pictured on November 16, 2018, woke up from a surgery at 14 and discovered her developing baby was gone. What remained was an incision from her panty line to her belly button, cut without her permission.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson
Recent revelations of the coerced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada are part of a long, complex and disturbing history – in which feminism became a fight to keep one’s own children.
Any children born of genome editing are genetic mosaics with uncertain resistance to disease.
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Chinese researcher, Jainkui He claims to have created the world’s first genome-edited twins. Such action would pose unknown risks to the lives of these children and to humanity as a whole.