A Tokyo court ruled a restrictive sterilisation law “lacks rationality” in a landmark case, though it stopped short of declaring the decades-old statute unconstitutional.
TOKYO: A Japanese court ruled on Tuesday that a law severely restricting women’s access to sterilisation “lacks rationality”. The Tokyo District Court’s decision was hailed by plaintiffs as a “step forward” in their landmark lawsuit.
The court, however, did not find the decades-old “maternity protection” law to be outright unconstitutional or illegal. It also dismissed the five women’s claim that the statute denies them their right to bodily autonomy.
The plaintiffs united over an innate discomfort with their reproductive abilities and an aversion to a patriarchal society they say pushes women towards motherhood. Under the current law, a woman must have multiple children with her health at risk, or face life-threatening danger from pregnancy, to qualify for sterilisation.
Spousal consent is also required, effectively banning physicians from performing the procedure on healthy, childless women. Plaintiff Kazane Kajiya, 29, who never wanted children, flew to the United States at age 27 to have her fallopian tubes removed.
“This is a historic verdict,” Kajiya told reporters outside the court. She considers her form of happiness “different from what is supposed to be the right answer in Japan,” a society rapidly ageing and determined to boost falling birth rates.
Presiding judge Masahiro Kamano stated that women are “guaranteed contraceptive freedom” under the Constitution. He said they can “decide to avoid pregnancy, without interference from the state”.
The judge noted that “multiple other methods exist” for birth control besides sterilisation. Therefore, he found it “difficult to conclude that undergoing sterilisation is essential to the survival of one’s identity”.
Still, Kamano called the law’s restrictiveness irrational and urged more active debate over the status quo. Lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, Michiko Kameishi, expressed regret that the court recognised sterilisation “merely as one way of contraception”.
She argued the procedure is fundamentally about “removing fertility altogether”. For the plaintiffs, she said, it is the only way they “can feel alive in their own bodies”.
Kajiya vowed to continue her battle against the law, which she called a patriarchal holdover that stigmatises child-free women. The lawsuit cited a 2002 study by global NGO EngenderHealth, which found more than 70 countries explicitly permitted the procedure as contraception.
Japan was among only eight nations that forbade or severely restricted it. The government’s Children and Families Agency, named in the lawsuit, was not immediately available for comment.
The Sun Malaysia
