Indians reversing sterilizations

MADRAS, India — Vasanthi lost both her children — a son and a daughter — on Dec. 26 when the giant waves struck. She was speechless and barely eating when health workers came upon her at a relief camp in her seaside village, Kallar, in Nagapattinam district, Tamil Nadu state, a month after the disaster.

When the tsunami dead were interred in mass burials, nearly all the women wailed uncontrollably, but Vasanthi, 35, remained quiet.

In tropical south India, where most people bathe and change their clothing daily, she did not take a bath nor change her sari for weeks. She wouldn’t speak to her husband. Occasionally, the fisherwoman gazed for hours with tired eyes at a photograph of her children, but she never cried.

Counselors worked to bring her out of her silence, but she did not respond at first, and was diagnosed as a typical case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

After a week, she did regain the ability to speak, but she remained depressed through the following month.

Sterilization reversal

“When she started speaking slowly, we discovered she had turned mute because of the shock she got when she lost her children. Then her depression grew because she knew that she could not conceive again, having undergone sterilization through a tubectomy six years ago,” said Nirmala Palanisamy, one of Tamil Nadu’s 300 or so tsunami counselors.

“As soon as we explained there was a possibility that she might become a mother again if she underwent a reversal of sterilization, we noticed a remarkable change in her behavior and her depression seemed to lift.”

As part of a government-sponsored nationwide family-planning program aimed at controlling India’s annual population growth of 20 million people, more than 3 million women in Tamil Nadu like Vasanthi have undergone sterilization in the past decade.

At a medical workshop in Madras last week, Miss Palanisamy reported that in three tsunami-wrecked villages of Nagapattinam, she and her colleagues found 55 women who want to reverse their sterilization.

Government officials in Madras announced this week that families who lost all of their children to the tsunami would be offered free reversal-of-sterilization procedures at government hospitals to help them bear children again.

Free surgery offered

Tamil Nadu Health Secretary Sheela Rani Chunkath said this week that administrators of tsunami-hit coastal districts have been asked to list the applicants and make arrangements for the free surgery to rejoin women’s reproductive tubes as soon as possible.

A statement from the health department said that those getting reversal surgery at private hospitals would be reimbursed 25,000 rupees ($575) for medical expenses.

The Community Health Education Society (CHES), a Madras-based nongovernmental organization providing counseling to tsunami victims in Tamil Nadu, said more than 600 women and about 100 men who had undergone tubectomy and vasectomy were desperate to reverse their sterilization. About 8,000 lives, including those of about 2,500 children, were lost to the tsunami.

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