WUNRN
KENYA - HIV-POSITIVE WOMEN PLAN
LEGAL ACTION OVER FORCED STERILISATION
Source: Alertnet //
Katy Migiro - 13 September 2012
By Katy Migiro
Achieng’s neighbours carried
her to
“I bled until I didn’t know
where I was. I lost my mind,” she said.
A week later, a doctor touring
the ward told her that they had sterilised her. She was 22 years old.
“He said: ‘It’s because of your
situation and your HIV status that they sterilised you,’” Achieng told
TrustLaw. “I was not supposed to give birth because the children would be (HIV)
positive… They said: ‘Sterilisation is good for someone like you.’”
For other women, the threat to
stop supplying antiretroviral drugs for their HIV infection or formula milk for
their babies convinced them to submit to the knife.
“I was a single mother and did
not have a job or anyone to depend on at the time,” said Pamela Adeka, who
attended Blue House
clinic, run by aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), in
When Adeka visited the clinic
expecting to be given formula, the nurse started pressurising her to get
sterilised. She left empty handed.
“I asked myself what were my
twins going to eat if they did not get their formula? They were not yet six
months old so they could not even take porridge,” Adeka told TrustLaw.
She later consented to
sterilisation, which she said has left her weak and unable to work. She
experiences bouts of heavy bleeding from her womb.
FEAR AND CONFUSION
Doctors told Teresia Njoki she
would die if she kept giving birth because she was HIV positive.
“If the doctor tells you (that)
you are going to die, it makes you so vulnerable,” she said. “I was in labour
and I was going for a c-section. There was that mixed fear and confusion. So
that is what made me sign.”
The women’s experiences are
documented in Robbed of Choice,
a recent study by the African Gender and Media Initiative.
Its author, Faith Kasiva,
maintains that forcible and coerced sterilisation of poor, HIV-positive women
is “systemic in public health facilities”.
Lawyers from the Kenya Legal
and Ethical Issues Network on HIV and AIDS (KELIN)
are helping the 40 women interviewed by Kasiva to sue the government.
“We are currently still
analysing the evidence. So far we have about five solid cases,” said Allan
Maleche who heads KELIN.
“By solid, I mean they have
documentation to show they were admitted in the hospital and the process of
sterilisation undertaken.”
MSF has said it will
investigate cases at its clinic featured in the report.
‘UNWORTHY’ OF REPRODUCTION
Illegal sterilisation of poor,
stigmatised women, deemed “unworthy” of reproduction, is a global problem,
according to the Open
Society Foundation, resulting in social isolation, family conflict,
abandonment and grief.
It has documented the
sterilisation of HIV-positive women using coercion – when incentives,
misinformation or intimidation are used to compel a woman to undergo the
procedure – as well as force – when a woman is sterilised without her knowledge
or informed consent – in Namibia, South Africa, Venezuela, Chile, Mexico and
Dominican Republic.
Hopes for justice have been
raised by a Namibian
court ruling in July, which found that state hospitals illegally sterilised
three HIV-positive women. The women had not given informed consent as they were
presented with sterilisation forms just before or after giving birth, without
being told what they were signing, the ruling said.
However, the judge did not feel
there was sufficient evident to prove that it was a discriminatory practice
against women living with HIV.
“We will try our best to prove
the link (in the Kenyan case) because out of all the women that we have so far,
none of them is HIV negative,” said Maleche.
Comments made by health
workers, included in the African Gender and Media Initiative report – such as
“Woman, you are still giving birth and you are HIV-positive?” – seem to suggest
that the women were sterilised because of their HIV status.
One woman was even taken to a
ward occupied by children with AIDS-related infections to deter her from having
a child.
‘THE CHOICE IS YOURS’
The Ministry of Public Health
and Sanitation has asked the regulatory Medical Practitioners and Dentists
Board to investigate and discipline the institutions and professionals involved
in such abuses. This may include pressing criminal charges against them.
“The government’s position is
very clear. Whether you are HIV-positive or not, the choice is yours,” said
Shanaz Sharif, the director of medical services.
“The government does not say
that, if you are HIV-positive, you should not get children.”
Thanks to an aggressive
antenatal testing policy and the provision of antiretroviral drugs to pregnant
women and their babies, 90 percent of babies born to HIV-positive women in
But between 7,000 and 10,000
babies still contract the disease in Kenya each year, largely because their
mothers do not attend clinics or decline to get tested, he added.
NO CHILD, NO HOPE
The suffering of the sterilised
women is particularly acute because of the status attached to motherhood in
“We live in an African cultural
setting where having a child or motherhood is glorified in a way that probably
it’s not in other societies,” said Kasiva, director of the African Gender and
Media Initiative.
“A lot of these women, because
they cannot give birth, they have been chased away from their homesteads.
Others have been disinherited.”
Achieng, now 30, is resigned to
living alone with her two daughters after her husband died in an accident. “I
have given up on life,” she said.
Although she has had suitors,
none will marry her because she has been sterilised.
“If a man marries you, you have
to give him a child. You won’t be called a woman if you don’t have a child with
him,” she said. “I am not that old… but because of this (sterilisation) I can’t
stay in a marriage.”