How do you make things right with a woman who has, effectively, had the right to bear children ripped from her?
It is beyond ironic, it is appallingly tragic, that, in the season of focus on crimes against women and the campaign against HIV-Aids, women who were forcibly sterilised or without their proper informed consent have to serve legal papers on the government to get some sort of justice.
And what kind of justice will it be, in the end?
How do you make things right with a woman who has, effectively, had the right to bear children ripped from her? You can’t.
The best you can hope to do, as a government, is admit that mistakes were made – as national health department spokesperson Foster Mohale has done – and put in place measures to ensure these travesties never happen again.
We accept Mohale’s assurance that doctors at state hospitals were never instructed to carry out hysterectomies on HIV-positive women.
Why this happened needs to be probed, though.
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Was it because the medics believed they could help alleviate future Aids suffering by preventing those living with the disease from having children?
If that is indeed the case, then what gives those people, qualified as they may be, the right to play God?
Let us not forget that South Africa has the highest number of HIV-positive people in the world.
Nor should we forget that hundreds of thousands of deaths due to Aids may have been prevented if then president Thabo Mbeki had authorised the use of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs).
Even more tragic for the women forcibly sterilised because of their HIV status, is that the use of ARVs had been shown to dramatically cut down the rate of mother-to-child transmission of the disease.
What the whole sorry saga illustrates all too clearly is that the lower you are on our social pyramid – and the poorer you are – the less chance you have of being treated humanely.
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