‘We’re not wombs’: Japan women seek rights to sterilisation

Under a maternity protection law in Japan, women face multiple hurdles to qualify for sterilisation. Read more at straitstimes.com.

Tokyo - When Ms Kazane Kajiya voluntarily sterilised herself in the United States aged 27, she essentially “flipped the middle finger” at Japan’s patriarchal society that had long pushed her towards motherhood.

In the rapidly ageing country desperate to boost its falling birth rates, women seeking to make themselves infertile were assumed “not even to exist”, said Ms Kajiya, who has never wanted children.

She and four other women are now challenging the constitutionality of Japan’s decades-old “maternity protection” law, one of the world’s most restrictive barriers to sterilisation.

A verdict in their landmark lawsuit dubbed “maternity is not my body’s purpose” is due next week.

Under the law, a woman must have multiple children with her health at risk, or face life-threatening danger from pregnancy, to qualify for sterilisation. Even then, spousal consent is required.

This bans physicians from operating on healthy, childless women like Ms Kajiya, now 29, who flew to the US to have her fallopian tubes removed in what she described as a minimally invasive procedure.