It Is No Coincidence That The Peruvian Women Who Were Forcibly Sterilized Against Their Will Spoke Quechua.

Quechua is a language that is not thoroughly supported to survive by the government, but a language of community and family nonetheless. In 1995, ex-President of Peru, and now federal prisoner for humans rights violations, Alberto Fujimori led the General Population Law under the pretense that a lower birth rate would decrease poverty levels. But nowhere in that ruling did it say that women’s rights would be upheld. In the four years of the bill, 260, 874 women had tubal litigations forcibly and without their consent.

The same women who spoke Quechua would be included in Henderson’s statement in that privileged lawmakers state that “Black women, and other women deemed ‘unfit’ (often including Indigenous women) (…)” are unfit to reproduce.” Even more disturbing is that Zedner “points out the tendency to send women to prison (…) for as many of their childbearing years as possible.” How can it be that “across cultures, darker people suffer most. Why?” It is the indigenous people that are the rightful citizens of this world that respected the Earth’s being and grew alongside it. Yet it is their genes that are deemed defective and undesirable which sparked the eugenics movement, a form of destruction of the world’s people. It is the people’s language and intense melanin that creates their beautiful skin that was attempted to be removed from society. How can it be that their ability to reproduce was not recognized as just of a blessing and gift as that of the lighter-skinned woman who didn’t speak Quechua. It is infuriating that the sterilization is imposed on women who speak a second language, know the value of hard work, and really are the symbol of a nation.

In Peru, the forced sterilization of indigenous women still haunts them to this day and even more so with the announcement of Keiko Fujimori running for president. Keiko Fujimori refuses to acknowledge the full extent of her father’s crimes and simply reduces the issue to blaming “individual rogue medical practioners.” Yet it is in Piura of northern Peru, where my father is also from, that doctors are standing in protest and stating that they refused to commit such “treatments.” The forced sterilization that Alberto Fujimori inflicted in the women of rural communities that spoke Quechua, such as Mamerita Mastanza, was not the right of way for a country to flourish in an economic way, but rather a form of elimination of future indigenous people. Sterilization is not only a violation of a woman’s body, but it is the violation of their mind which is to murder the precious thoughts they have of their culture, it is the intended elimination of the world’s people’s beautiful skin and beautiful language — Quechua. It is in Piura of northern Peru, where many dreamt of and desired unborn babies had their lives decided for.

…Additionally, why is that the woman’s body is always attacked? If they are not raped and shunned, they are denied their reproduction rights and forced into sterilization against their will. How is that privileged lawmakers find it so easy to harm a woman’s bodily functions when it takes a member of the opposite sex to even initiate the process of a new life being formed?

Across cultures, women (of color) also suffer the most.