HIV-positive women subjected to ‘Nazi’ experiments

It is chilling to think that in our country – which has a constitution which enshrines human rights – we could have seen forced medical procedures on people which echoed the ghastly experiments the Nazis carried out on Holocaust victims at Auschwitz concentration camp.

If that seems hysterical, then consider this: hundreds of HIV-positive women, all of them black and from poor areas, were effectively forcibly sterilised by the state during our government’s campaign against Aids in the 1990s and 2000s.

This campaign to remove the uteruses of HIV-positive women – presumably in order to stop the transmission of the virus from mother to child – continued until last year, according to a study recently completed by researchers at Unisa.

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The study confirmed that the lives of the women had been irrevocably changed and that all of them said they had not given full, informed consent for the procedure to be carried out to, effectively, render them barren.

For many women, this had profound psychological impacts.

One said: “They took a lot of things from me because even mentally I have not been okay since that day.”

She added: “My dream is to see the government stopping to destroy more women’s lives because of this kind of practice.”

The Unisa study reports that not only were the women not properly informed, they were also offered no follow-up counselling, which made the mental effects that much more profound.

Professor Thenjiwe Meyiwa, one of the experts who conducted the research, said the practice “violated the dignity, autonomy and reproductive rights” of the women, as well as subjecting them to “cruel, torturous, or inhuman and degrading treatment.”

That’s a damning indictment of how the poorer you are, the fewer rights you have, even in a country supposedly committed to freedom and equality for all of its citizens.

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