Inquiry Into Practice of Sterilising Disabled Women
By Tom Nightingale,
ABC News (Australia)
| 11. 01. 2012
A Senate committee is looking into the controversial practice of sterilising disabled people, something many Australians are shocked to find is legal.
The UN is pushing for the practice to be banned and the Federal Government says it is looking at possible changes to laws.
The situation faced by the parents of disabled women is not black and white.
In one submission to the Senate inquiry, a mother explained the decision to stop her intellectually disabled daughter becoming pregnant.
"Her own life is not stable enough to support another life," the submission said.
"The reality is if this person had a child, that child would be dead within a week. Human services would have to be involved."
The woman's daughter is 27 and had a contraceptive device implanted four years ago to manage her periods.
The mother says she would not make the decision for anyone else, but with much thought and agonising she says her daughter should never have a child.
The anonymous submission says it is the right decision, given the disabled woman now has a boyfriend.
"Why...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 10.29.2026
At the beginning of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s blockbuster documentary You Can See Everything, Billy Evans (partner of Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes), says that they decided to do the film for one purpose: “radical transparency.” As they work on “Theranos 2.0,” Evans and Holmes want to show the public that she has been misunderstood –– painted as a liar and a fraud in the public imagination (and the courts) despite, as she claims in the...
By Jennifer Denbow, Guest Contributor
| 10.29.2026
Almost every day I am reminded that we are in the midst of a fertility panic. Whether it’s the Vice President exhorting Americans to have more babies or The New York Times running yet another story about the fertility cliff, fear about falling fertility rates is everywhere. While centrally concerned with declining rates of childbearing, Anna Louie Sussman’s new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, is a welcome antidote to the panic.
Sussman has written...
By Jan Grue, The Guardian | 10.27.2026
For a very long time, I dreamed of being cured. I was born in 1981. I learned to walk early enough, but I stumbled and fell more easily than other children. My parents began to worry that something was wrong...
By staff, We Are Egg Donors | 10.21.2026
Michelle Lambrechts is a police officer and one-time egg donor in Belgium. She is also the founder of Ik Zit Met Een Ei, a Belgian nonprofit that advocates for egg donors. (The name is a Dutch play on words...
