Ruth Achieng of Nairobi, Kenya, is
one of 40 HIV-positive women planning to sue the Kenyan government for forced
or coerced sterilisation. Ruth is one of many Kenyan women who knew nothing
about her operation until it was too late.

After bleeding profusely Ruth’s neighbours
carried her to Nairobi’s Kenyatta National Hospital. She
was having a miscarriage. A week later, a doctor informed her that she had been sterilised. Ruth was only 22 years old. The Doctor told her: “It’s because of
your situation and your HIV status that they sterilised you”. Ruth says “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, there have been threats by
medics to stop supplying antiretroviral drugs for their HIV infection or providing
formula milk for their babies which gave them no choice but to submit to
sterilisation.

Another story comes from Pamela Adeka who
attended the Blue House clinic in the
Mathare slum, Nairobi. She
says “I was a single mother and did not have a job or anyone to depend on at
the time”. On visiting the clinic Pamela expected to be given formula for her
family, instead the nurse pressurised her to get sterilised and she
left with nothing. Because of the nurse’s advice, Pamela later consented to
sterilisation, which she has described as leaving her weak and unable to work.

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”.

“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 suffering of the sterilised women is
particularly acute because of the status attached to motherhood in Kenya. “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, her hopes of marriage and any form of security are next to none. She is now heavily stigmatised within her society. No man will marry her because she has been sterilised.

For more information on Forced Sterilisation please click HERE. 

To read an Open Society Report on Torture in Healthcare click HERE.