‘I have been in pain since the sad moment I got sterilised. I have stomach pains since the sterilisation. I came only to speak about the sterilisation.’
So says Testimony 1/58, whose voice has been recorded by the Quipu project. Set up as a collaboration between academics, Chaka Studios and Peruvian grassroots organisations, the project has collected hundreds of stories from women affected by the Peruvian government’s mass sterilisation programme that ran in the latter half of the 1990s.
‘Before the early 1990s,’ explains Dr Karen Tucker, an academic specialising in indigenous rights and international politics, ‘women did not have good access to contraception. The influence of the Catholic church was very strong in the country, and reproductive rights were not high on the agenda. This changed when the Peruvian government launched a mass programme offering a range of contraception options, including sterilisation to both men and women. The programme used the language of choice and empowerment – it was sold with the promise that, irrespective of social class or location, families would at last have access to a range of contraceptive options.’
