5 - Voluntary Sterilization

Summary

Sterilization, in the family planning context, involves an operation on the reproductive organs of a man or woman with a view to terminate permanently his or her capacity to produce a child. Female sterilization or tubal ligation of women for medical reasons has been performed in Singapore since the early post-war years, though on a very limited scale. Since its inception in 1949, the Family Planning Association (FPA) was quite often confronted by women seeking sterilization because of medical, social, or economic reasons. As a matter of policy, the Association could not accede to these requests for sterilization, but referred the more deserving cases to the Kandang Kerbau Hospital where each case was considered carefully on its own merits. For instance, among the referred cases, thirty women were sterilized in 1958 and twenty-seven in 1959. The position, up to the late 1950s, is one where voluntary sterilization was performed discreetly, on a small number of women, without much publicity or public attention. Most of them were sterilized on medical grounds and only a handful on social or economic grounds, provided they already had a large family of at least more than six children.

The idea of adopting voluntary sterilization as a means of population control was first openly advocated by Professor B.H. Sheares, a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Malaya in Singapore, in an exclusive interview with the local press on 18 June 1959. This was after he had earlier presented his views in a paper delivered at the Conference of Planned Parenthood, organized by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, in New Delhi from 14–21 February of the same year. He reiterated his stand that the answer to the population control problem in Singapore lay in voluntary sterilization and not so much in contraception. He was, however, careful to clarify that he was speaking only from an academic point of view and had no intention of influencing government policy or action. Nonetheless, the public statement of such an eminent academic in the newspapers could not but result in considerable public discussion on the pros and cons of using sterilization as an accepted method of population control.