U.N. HELPS STERILIZE MEXICANS AGAINST THEIR WILL, REPORT SAYS: “MEXICO CITY – In early September, 21-year-old Obdulia decided to go to the nearest health center to get treated for abdominal pain. But the ‘treatment’ she got was an unasked-for and undesired tubal ligation.

“Obdulia, who doesn’t want to give her last name, had dreams of having more babies. A native of the Tzotzil ethnic group, she lives in a small rural town 130 miles away from San Cristóbal de las Casas, the capital city of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

“More than 400 cases like hers have moved Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights to issue a harsh report Dec. 16 denouncing the fact that in all of Mexico’s 31 states health organizations have been imposing contraceptive devices on natives and peasants without their consent. The report mentions the United Nations and the Mexican Institute of Social Security in particular.

“The commission’s report says it found that ‘medical personnel in public rural clinics force women to accept the use of intrauterine devices as a method of birth control’ under threat of losing the help provided by government programs.

“‘This commission has also documented that medical and paramedic personnel of the ‘community health brigades’ working in areas of native population put pressure on the male population in order to obtain their consent for the application of irreversible methods [vasectomy] by promising them material goods and economic help,’ the report also says. ‘In some extreme cases, they are threatened with being excluded from government programs if they do not accept the vasectomy.’

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