Mother and child in Lima. Flickr/Señor Hans. Some rights reserved.
It was 1997 when I set out with a research team to rural communities in Ayacucho to conduct a needs assessment for Health Net International. Although our focus was on primary health care, it was impossible to ignore the central concern of many women and their loved ones. Something was terribly wrong.
There was a little boy who came to me for help because his mother could no longer walk following her visit to the health post. The family had to cart her around atop their small mule: “Doctora, can’t you do something for my mom?” There was a nurse practitioner in Cangallo who approached me in a quasi-confessional manner, motivated by the guilt that had accompanied her since participating in a Tubal Ligation Festival. Along with other staff from the Ministry of Health (MINSA), she had spent two days in makeshift operating rooms, sterilizing 147 women. At some point, the team realized they did not have a sufficient quantity of anesthesia, and collectively decided to continue with the surgeries. The women began screaming in pain, alarming the others who were crowded into the waiting room. Hospital attendants slid padlocks through the doors, and the team continued performing the sterilizations. The nurse practitioner was crying as she told me what she had done, but I had neither the capacity nor the right to offer her absolution. If she wanted forgiveness, then she would need to seek it from those terrified women. To date, I know of no health care provider who has publicly apologized to the thousands of human beings they treated like unos cuyes—like guinea pigs.
