NEWS FOCUS:Medical attention is being withheld from HIV-positive women in South Africa and Namibia until they agree to sterilisation
PREGNANT HIV-positive women in Southern Africa are being coerced by doctors into accepting sterilisation as a form of birth control, a leading women’s rights group has claimed.
Interviews carried out by the International Community of Women Living with HIV/Aids (ICW) in South Africa and Namibia among groups of HIV-positive women over the past five years have recorded numerous accounts from pregnant women who claim doctors have told them that unless they consent to sterilisation, medical services will be withheld.
Some women have also told the ICW they were sterilised by doctors without their permission during abortion procedures.
ICW regional co-ordinator Gcebile Ndlovu told The Irish Timesthat some pregnant HIV-positive women seeking medical services were given the sterilisation option shortly before they gave birth, which was a totally inappropriate time to bring the subject up.
“A lot of the women go through with it because at the time they feel they have no choice,” she said.
Early last month three women launched a High Court action against the Namibian government in the capital Windhoek in which they are suing the state for allegedly sterilising them without their consent once they were diagnosed as HIV positive.
The Legal Assistance Centre (LAC), a rights group representing the women, claims it has documented 15 cases of HIV sterilisation since 2008 in the country’s hospitals.
The women, whose identities are being withheld to protect them from discrimination, are seeking one million Namibian dollars (approximately €103,000) from the country’s health ministry as compensation for their ordeal.
Amon Ngavetene of the LAC told reporters that some of the women were not always told everything they needed to know about the sterilisation procedure, and that pre-existing conditions were not always taken into account.
Promise Mthembu, an ICW activist who established the Young Woman’s Dialogue (YWD) programme in Namibia and South Africa in 2004, a forum in which HIV-positive women meet and discuss issues relating to their illness, said she had encountered hundreds of women who felt forced into accepting sterilisation.
“After making pamphlets for the YWD programme and distributing them I started to receive many letters from HIV-positive women who were saying they had been forcibly sterilised.
“As I had also gone through this experience myself, I got inspired to look for funding to research the issue more in Namibia and South Africa.
“From the number of people who said it has happened to them, I would think that thousands of women in the region would have had similar experiences,” she said.
African women between the ages of 20 and 34 run the highest risk of being infected with HIV.
On average, an infected pregnant woman not receiving lifesaving anti-retroviral (ARVs) drugs has a one in four chance of transmitting the virus to her unborn child.
Taking ARVs reduces that risk to about one in 50, but the relatively inexpensive drugs remain inaccessible to many HIV-positive people in Africa due to underfunding.
According to Mthembu, some doctors appeared to be using sterilisation as a form of contraception, and as a means to stem the transmission of the virus from mother to child.
Mthembu, who is HIV positive, explained she encountered the issue of forced sterilisation 18 months after she had been diagnosed with the disease in 1997 during a spell in hospital.
“I was in a Durban hospital seeking treatment for a gynaecological problem. I was there for seven days but no doctors would treat me. A consultant then came to my bed and said they would treat me, but only if I would agree to sterilisation.
“I was not fit to make such a decision, but I felt that I had no choice: accept this or no treatment,” she recalled.
She went on to say forced sterilisation was not new to the region, and could be linked back to the apartheid era when the practice was used as a means of keeping the black population under control.
“There is no government policy directive that advocates this.
“So it is individual doctors who think it is a valid means to stop the spread of HIV.
“But HIV prevention should not interfere with a person’s human right to have a child.
“We need to see the doctors who are doing this stopped, and being held accountable,” she concluded.