Justice delayed for Peru sterilization victims

[AlphaCentauri]

It was 1996 when Micaela Flores and 15 other women from Peru's highlands accepted an ambulance ride to a Cuzco clinic, lured by the offer of a free medical checkup.

But when they arrived, the clinic's doors were locked behind them.

"'We're going to make a small incision,'" Flores, now 54, said she was told. When she resisted, the mother of seven said health workers tied her feet and hands and anesthetized her.

All the women, said Flores, were surgically rendered barren through tubal ligations.

She is among more than 2,000 women who issued formal complaints about being forcibly sterilized under a program created by then-President Alberto Fujimori to dramatically lower Peru's birth rate.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_PERU_FORCED_STERILIZATIONS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-02-14-11-26-12

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[jwirr]

2. One of the saddest things here is that the government was sterilizing them while the church was

telling them they could not use birth control. Many of these women might have voluntarily limited the number of children they had if the church had kept it's nose out of it.

[Judi Lynn]

3. A tragic situation made unbearable by the point you've just made. Disrespected beyond endurance.

They were all treated like objects, completely stripped of dignity, and common human identity.

The coldness of it all horrifies, sickens, enrages.

[BlueIris]

4. Awful. Deeply misogynist and just wrong. nt