Amerikansk NGO tilbyder HIV-smittede kvinder i Kenya penge for at lade sig sterilisere eller langtids-beskytte mod graviditet. Ikke alle synes om ideen.
The Kenyan government and rights groups have expressed outrage at a project in western Kenya that is paying HIV-positive women to undergo long-term contraception, writes IRIN.
Project Prevention, a US-based NGO, offers cash to drug addicts in the US and the UK to undergo long-term contraception or permanent sterilization.
In 2010, the project started offering HIV-positive women in western Kenya US$40 to be fitted with intrauterine devices (IUDs), which can prevent pregnancy for over a decade.
The project uses a medical practitioner in the western Kenyan town of Kakamega to insert the IUDs for $7 per woman; so far, 22 women have undergone the procedure.
– There are two issues here; one is using incentives to push women into taking up birth control, and the second is pushing women with HIV to take up long-term birth control irrespective of their reproductive needs, said Agnes Odhiambo of New York-based Human Rights Watch.
– All women, including women with HIV, have the right to make informed choices about their reproductive health and that effectively means to use a contraceptive method of their choice, whether long or short term – the key word here is informed choice, she added, and continued:
– Giving economic incentives to women with HIV, or any woman for that matter, to undertake long-term contraception is a form of coercion and violates women’s reproductive rights and choices.
ULOVLIGT
According to James Kamau, coordinator of the Kenya Treatment Access Movement, the project was “wrong, immoral and unethical”.
‘- Someone, somewhere is sleeping on the job because a project like this cannot and should not be allowed to practise in Kenya’.
He noted that it contradicted provisions against discrimination in the country’s HIV and AIDS Prevention and Control Act of 2006.
Ministry of Health officials say Project Prevention did not seek the government’s authority before beginning its operations, making its activities illegal.
South African media reports in May said Project Prevention planned to start similar operations in South Africa.
