'We're not wombs': Japan women seek rights to sterilisation

Japanese women challenge restrictive sterilization laws, asserting their right to bodily autonomy against societal pressures to motherhood.

When 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", Ms. Kajiya, who has never wanted children, told AFP.

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 U.S. to have her fallopian tubes removed in what she described as a minimally invasive procedure.