The world’s most common contraception has a dark past
Raji Kevat of Ganiyari, Chhattisgarh, has mixed feelings about tubal ligation, the most common form of female sterilisation. It is an operation that she has undergone herself. After she received the procedure in 2014 at one of the Indian government’s now-infamous sterilisation ‘camps’, she advised her sister-in-law, Shiv Kumari Kevat, to do the same.
Shiv Kumari and 82 other women lined up in an otherwise abandoned hospital in the city of Bilaspur in November 2014. The surgeon cut the women with a single instrument, allegedly without changing his gloves between each surgery. The women were then laid on the hospital floor to recover.
That night, Shiv Kumari began vomiting and experiencing terrible pain in her gut. She was dead within days. While the government’s official explanation was that the deaths happened due to compromised drugs, a post-mortem report showed that Shiv Kumari had passed away due to septicaemia – likely from surgical infection. She was one of 13 women who died from the camp.
