Comments on the law on sterilisation of handicapped persons

We had since 1983 a article 428 in which the exercise of self-determination. The capacity for free and informed consent removed the criminalisation of injuries for organ donation, transsexual surgery and voluntary male and female sterilisation. And it was clear. Whoever was incapable of free and express consent could not be legally sterilised and could not - I assume - have an organ removed for transplantation or be transsexualised. Now, after 5 years, with the agreement of all political parties, all that passion for the freedom to decide about one's own body has been extinguished. And the judge can authorise sterilisation, can he even impose it? It seems that the punitive sterilisation of a person suffering from a serious mental illness is accepted. The judge is - with the financial aid of the public prosecutor and two specialists - empowered to authorise sterilisation if requested by tutor.

What do I think? It is a pity. I believe that in medical ethics there is a particular obligation to protect the weak. Everyone who goes to the doctor is frightened or threatened by illness. They are in a position of inferiority status . The doctor must respect them, all the more the weaker they are. A handicapped person, a handicapped girl must be protected from aggression, the more so the more defenceless she is. If we sterilise her, we turn her into a pure sexual object. She can be abused by whoever wants to abuse her: the father, the aggressors, the sex traders. To sterilise her, even legally, is to offend her, to rob her by force of the fundamental remnant of dignity she has left: the ability to be a mother.

Who does this new law protect? I know that, with good intentions, legislators have perhaps fallen into the trap of thinking that sterilisation is the most efficient way to protect the defective from abuse, from sexual exploitation.

But sterilisation - benevolently - does not protect mentally handicapped women from rape or sexual abuse. Sterilisation does not deter perpetrators. Sterilisation prevents pregnancy, but a sterile woman can be raped and abused even more than if she were fertile. She is much more vulnerable to sexual abuse since sterilisation removes the most obvious test of such abuse. The parents' concern is that their daughter does not become pregnant, and they are then totally unconcerned. We do no good. Quite the opposite. The same goes for the parents of retarded girls, who can still be maliciously accused of sexual perversion, of being a nuisance, of not knowing how to repress their tendencies. But sexuality and fertility are not the same thing.

It seems to me that all this is a conspiracy of the strong against the weak. The parents, those who run institutions for the handicapped, want to protect themselves from the conflicts of pregnancies of handicapped women, or from the alleged paternity lawsuits against those who depend on them. These concerns are true: but the solution does not lie in judge-ordered sterilisation. That is very serious. We are breaking article 14 of the Constitution: there are Spaniards from class A and from class B, some whose physical and moral integrity is respected and others who are subjected to inhuman and degrading punishment and treatment. Some have the right to freedom and security and others lose it through the conspiracy of the strong.

If we have to protect from abuse, we have to equip institutions better, we have to educate better, we have to supervise the transport of these girls, we have to teach them self-defence. It is not decent to sterilise so that the handicapped can live an active heterosexual life in freedom. Sterility is equated with pleasure or sexual frenzy, sterility with security against abuse. It is as if they say: we sterilise you and we don't have to worry about you any more.

Sterilisation rationalises nonchalance.

Degraded deficient people are so because of the neglect of society, of the family. And they are so in Degree proportional to the neglect. Now it will be worse. I see that the reform has been called for by people full of good intentions but coldly utilitarian. I am saddened that the Ombudsman is among them. Why does he defend the strong against the weak? Another thing: are sex offenders people affected by serious mental deficiencies? Nobody owns a man. In order to live carelessly without supervision, to save themselves the work of educating, the father, the judge, sterilise. They exercise an abusive dominion over an innocent person, or over someone they have not been able to educate or protect.

The way is made easier for the aggressor. Instead of strengthening protection - by establishing deterrent penalties for sexual abuse of the disabled and incapacitated - we seek the easy way out of contempt for biology and the person.

Gonzalo Herranz.