This paper aims to address an urgent and politically charged issue: the quantification of women sterilized without informed consent during Peru’s Fujimori regime. While prior narratives and public reports have drawn attention to this issue, this research contributes a novel empirical analysis that solidifies the extent of these human rights abuses.
This study uses data from the 2000 Demographic and Health Surveys (ENDES/DHS) and Ministry of Health records to document the extent of the lack of information provided to sterilized women. It consists first of a descriptive approach that links the variable on lack of information and the adopted contraceptive method. Then the study performs a comprehensive estimate of the impact of denied information on the probability that a woman be sterilized. This research also estimates the causal effects of lack of information on the probability of regret about the sterilization. To ensure unbiasedness and robustness of results, several empirical strategies are implemented, all of which deliver very stable coefficients.
This study not only corroborates testimonies of coerced sterilizations but also challenges prevailing denials that seek to minimize the severity of these violations. The findings reveal a profound intersection of health policy, human rights and gender-based discrimination, with implications for policymakers and scholars who examine the intersections of public health, law and political accountability. This study finds that of the 336,000 sterilizations performed between 1993 and 2000, approximately 220,000 women were deprived of essential information regarding alternative contraceptive methods, the risks of sterilization and its permanent consequences. In this revised version, it is also found that lack of informed consent causally accounts for 130,000 cases. Moreover, 26,000 women were not informed that the procedure would permanently prevent future pregnancies.
A limitation of this research, shared with any quantitative research that uses survey data, is that the exactness of results diminishes substantially for a more granular analysis. Future research may be able to remedy this limitation.
These findings offer a stark rebuttal to revisionist narratives that frame coerced sterilizations as isolated incidents, underscoring the widespread nature of these human rights violations. A quantitative well-documented account of the massiveness of sterilization performed without informing properly to women would create awareness of this issue that will increase the probability of justice being made, reparations being acknowledged and that cases like this do not happen anymore.
These underscore the widespread nature of these human rights violations. This study also shows how the poorer women of Peru, mostly Indigenous women, were subject to being sterilized without proper information.
So far, nobody has attempted to perform an estimation of sterilizations performed without informed consent in Peru. This study proposes a rigorous method based on data to overcome the difficulties for such estimation. It also complements the descriptive documentation of the massiveness of sterilizations with an estimation of causal effects from denying information about the consequences of sterilization on the probability of being sterilized. The main contribution is to complement the existing qualitative and case-studies documentation with a quantitative account of the magnitude of sterilizations without informed consent.
