Upon watching the documentary "La operacion", I was reminded of an article that I read almost a year ago in which parent's of a developmentally disabled girl allowed their daughter to be sterilized. The girl had a disease in which she would never be able to fully grow past the size of a seven-year-old. Because she would always look like a little girl, her parent's wanted her to remain sexually inactive and not have the ability to reproduce. While this is a slightly different topic, I thought that the article tied in with our numerous discussions about human rights, including the right to consent to any form of surgery or medical treatment (i.e. Puerto Rican women being sterilized without proper education, intersexual individuals receiving "corrective" surgeries at birth without consent, and the American government forcefully using Native Americans as guinea pigs in order to test vaccines)
While I could not find the exact article, I did come across a very interesting study, published by the Pediatric Committee on Bioethics, entitled, "Sterilization of Minors With Developmental Disabilities". Written in 1999, the article states, "Sterilization of persons with developmental disabilities has often been performed without appropriate regard for their [patients'] decision-making capacities, abilities to care for children, feelings, or interests." Parents and surgeons are taking away women's rights to reproduce because the patients are deemed not well enough to produce and raise healthy children.
While I obviously know very little about the topic, I still have to question the act of taking away one's right to reproduce without his/hers complete consent. If a woman could not physically give birth to a child, why must she be sterilized? In addition, what if a developmentally disabled woman wants to have a child but is deemed unfit by doctors? Who says she is not allowed to have a child? Does this not seem very similar to the Nazi's Eugenics movement in which inferior races (blacks and Jews) and handicaps were exterminated in order to allow the superior Aryan race to take over? I am deeply troubled by the practice of sterilization. Who has the right to say whether or not a person can have the ability to reproduce?
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/104/2/337
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A very perceptive connection! It seems that the intersections of race, gender, and disability are beginning to unfold! The girl was referred to as the "pillow angel" because she spends most of her life on pillows. Here is a link to a disability blog that explains the situation in detail http://www.katrinadisability.info/ashley.html
Please hold onto this thread in our discussion of disability. Very incisive!!
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