State, Sterilization, and Reproductive Rights: Japan as Occupier and Occupied

Abstract

May 11, 2001 marked an important step toward protecting individual reproductive rights in Japan. On that day, after a legal struggle that began in 1998, the Kumamoto District Court ruled that the segregation of Hansen’s disease patients in state-run sanatoriums, which had gone on for over half a century, was unconstitutional. The lawsuit was in large part due to the need for a clear statement of state responsibility in a serious infringement of human rights–the violation of individuals’ reproductive rights through sterilization and abortion, mostly forced upon them in state sanatoriums.¹ In one example, the head of a plaintiff’s group in western Japan, aged 82, acted to hold the state responsible for his forced sterilization. Hospitalized at 23 years of age in 1941, he married a woman at the facility and she became pregnant in 1943. When the pregnancy was discovered, she was forced to have an abortion and he was sterilized.²