When Hisui Tatsuta was in high school, his mother joked that she couldn’t wait to see the faces of her future grandchildren. Tatsuta, now a 24-year-old model in Tokyo, felt aversion to the assumption that she would one day give birth.
“I didn’t like being seen as a womb that can give birth before being seen as a person,” she said. Ultimately, she wants to be sterilized.
However, women in Japan seeking sterilization procedures such as tubal ligations or hysterectomies must meet conditions that are among the most onerous in the world. They must already have children and demonstrate that pregnancy would endanger their health, and they must obtain their spouse’s consent. That makes these types of surgeries difficult to obtain for many women, and virtually impossible for single, childless women like Tatsuta.
Now she and four other women are suing the Japanese government, arguing that a decades-old law, the Maternal Protection Act, violates their constitutional right to equality and self-determination and should be repealed.
During a recent hearing at the Tokyo District Court, Michiko Kameishi, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, described the law as “excessive paternalism” and said it “assumes that we think of a woman’s body as a body destined to become a mother.”
Experts say the plaintiffs, who are seeking damages of 1 million yen (about $6,400) per person with interest, face considerable obstacles. The women are pushing for the right to be sterilized at the same time that the government is trying to boost Japan’s birth rate, which has fallen to historic lows.
“For women who are able to give birth to stop having children is seen as a step backwards in society,” said Yoko Matsubara, a professor of bioethics at Ritsumeikan University.
Before four male government representatives during the court hearing, Miri Sakai, 24, a graduate student in sociology, testified that she had no interest in having children.
In Japan, sterilization is a sensitive topic due to the government’s history of imposing these procedures on people with psychiatric conditions or intellectual and physical disabilities. Sterilizations were carried out for decades under a 1948 measure, the Eugenic Protection Law. It was revised and renamed the Maternal Protection Act in 1996 to remove the eugenics clause, but lawmakers maintained strict requirements for women seeking abortions or sterilizations. Despite pressure from women’s rights activists, the law has not changed since 1996.
Japan’s right-wing Liberal Democratic Party government, along with the country’s deeply rooted traditional family values, have impeded progress on reproductive rights, said Yukako Ohashi, a writer and member of the Women’s Network for Reproductive Freedom.
Many Japanese people hesitate to defy social expectations due to strong pressure to conform.
“Many people feel that trying to change the status quo is selfish,” Tatsuta said. But when it comes to fighting for the right to make decisions about one’s body, he said, “I want everyone to be angry.”
