UWindsor Lance
Issue 30, Volume 85
Feb. 6, 2013
Jon Liedtke

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Imagine that you’re a female immigrant who made it to a developed country after a long and strenuous journey. You’ve re-established your life, found a new home, gainful employment and decided to settle down to raise a family, only to find out that you ‘re unable to conceive.

Upon speaking with your friends and an undercover journalist, you discover that injections given to you and the majority of other female immigrants from your homeland upon arrival into the country— and like clockwork every three months afterwards— were not simply inoculants as you were told, but rather were part of an aggressive forced birth control program which in effect temporarily sterilized all injected.

While it sounds like something out of a twisted science fiction story, such is the despicable, disgusting and deplorable state of affairs in Israel.

Recently, Israel has admitted that it had been giving female Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth control injections without informing them as to what the injections were for, and often the shots were administered without the knowledge or consent of the women.

The drug used, Depo-Provera, is a hormonal form of birth control which has to be injected every three months.

Following complaints by groups representing civil rights, women’s rights and immigrants, and an investigation by a journalist who interviewed 35 Ethiopian immigrants, Health Ministry Director General Prof. Ron Gamzu formally admitted to the injections in a letter addressed to Israeli HMOs, which instructed them “not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment.”

The year is 2013. Israel is a developed country. Immigrants have rights.

Something needs to be done about the current state of affairs in Israel.

Talk of settlement expansion, a two-state solution, an aggressive foreign Iobby and what many argue as an overly assertive military presence aside, it’s quite clear that the status quo in Israel is damaging to both democracy as a whole and individual rights.

I’ll stop short of calling this what it appears to be on face value: forced sterilization.

Things have gone terribly awry across the globe and it’s high time people begin to question the actions of their governments.

If we’ve learned one thing from this matter it’s this: governments act in their own self-interest, not in the interests of its residents.

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Jon Liedtke was the Features and Opinions Editor, Advertising Manager and Deficit Consultant at the UWindsor Lance.