Poor women are subjected to 'bicycle pump' sterilizations by desperate pushers of population control agenda in state-run camps

Monday, January 25, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: population control, sterilization, India

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(NaturalNews) Different cultures and different governments don't often look at social and sexual issues the same as Americans do, and that's fine - the world is a diverse place. But some practices by some governments are just grotesque and inhuman, and that includes using unorthodox (and dangerous) methods to carry out a social policy.

Britain's Telegraph newspaper recently published a graphic photo of a team of Indian physicians carrying out a sterilization procedure on a poor woman using a foot pump that was designed to inflate a bicycle tire.

56 tubectomies performed by one doctor in a single day

The paper, in its online edition, noted:

Surgeons at a sterilization camp in the village of Banarpal in Odisha state are understood to have used the device to inflate the abdomen of 56 women to make it easier to carry out the operation.

The picture has surfaced just a couple of weeks after reports that 13 women - most presumed to be Indian women - had died in a mass sterilization program in neighboring Chhattisgarh state, where officials there confessed that equipment used by a doctor carrying out the tubectomy procedures was rusty, while medicines he used were contaminated.

The picture of doctors inflating a female patient's abdomen with a bicycle pump was taken at a sterilization camp in Banarpal village, in the Angul district of Odisha state, according to reports. Local officials said that the grotesque, crude procedure was used to perform a total of 56 tubectomies over the course of a single day, the Hindustan Times reported.

'Bicycle pumps are used frequently'

The paper went onto report that the physician who performed the operations, Dr. Mahesh Prasad Rout, said that the use of the bike pump to inflate women's abdomens was a common practice throughout remote regions in the heavily populated country.

"Bicycle pumps are used frequently during sterilization in camps in rural areas that lack sophisticated surgical equipment used for inflating the abdomen," Rout was quoted as saying by the Times.

Meanwhile, the Indian paper said, local officials pledged to look into the reports and said they would be submitting a report in a few days.

Usually, reports noted, proper medical equipment is utilized to inflate a woman's abdomen so doctors can perform tubectomies. Such equipment is able to regulate the inflation rate so that the pressure being generated is consistent, steady and safe.

Though Rout, who has reportedly performed more than 60,000 of the procedures during his decade-long, award-winning career, insisted that the bike pump was sterilized prior to being placed inside the woman in the photograph, there is nonetheless a great potential for human error, experts noted, such as massive, violent over-expansion of the stomach. That alone makes the practice dangerous.

The Telegraph further reported:

[Recently] the doctor responsible for the mass-sterilization Chhattisgarh state which left 13 women dead and dozens hospitalized was accused of using rusty instruments to perform the operations.

R.K. Gupta, allegedly carried out 83 tubectomies in just three hours at a state-run 'family planning camp' on November 8.

Forced sterilization in India common

In that incident, most women became ill directly following their procedure. Local government officials said the equipment utilized was rusty and medicines that were given to the women post-procedure were tainted and should not have been used.

The women's cause of death was not immediately known, officials said, adding that the victims mostly exhibited signs of toxic shock syndrome, perhaps due to the use of non-sterilized surgical equipment and/or contaminated medicines.

Such sterilization camps across India are common.

In 2000, according to The New York Times, the Indian parliament abandoned annual sterilization targets. "Instead, it set an agenda for improving health and education for women and children, while offering couples a range of purely voluntary contraceptive choices," the paper said.

But the Indian government - then and now - struggled to provide for hundreds of millions of desperately poor citizens in the country of nearly 1.3 billion, so it essentially allows states to adopt and implement their own policies to control population growth.

Sources:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

http://www.nytimes.com

www.cia.gov