You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Americans Exporting a Sterilization Compound

Listen
Media Options
Listen

Related

Stephen Mumford’s house looks much like any other in the leafy suburbs of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. No one would ever guess what he has in his basement. Down there are more than 300,000 tiny yellow pellets in rows of white plastic jars. The pellets, made of a compound known as quinacrine, are bound for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco and more than a dozen other countries. There, in remote, often filthy clinics and doctors offices, they will be used to sterilize some of the world’s poorest women.

Stephen Mumford and another American, Dr. Elton Kessel, have supplied quinacrine that has been used to sterilize more than 100,000 women throughout the third world. They say their goal is to improve the lives and protect the health of women living in underdeveloped countries, almost 600,000 of whom die each year from pregnancy related complications. Some women seeking routine gynecological care have been sterilized without their knowledge or against their will. A Wall Street Journal story documents how this happened to more than 100 workers at a rubber plant in Vietnam. The drug is outlawed by the FDA for sterilization and the World Health Organization has consistently pushed governments to discontinue its use.

Guest:

  • Stephen Mumford, the founder of the Center for Research on Population and Security in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
  • Sally Epstein, a population consultant who raises funds for Mumford’s project. She is also a board member of the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington, DC.
  • Adrienne Germain, is president of the International Women’s Health Coalition in New York City.
  • Gita Sen, is a professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore

Related links:

.
.
.

Related Story

StoryMar 07, 2024New Pakistan Gov’t Marks Return of “Bourgeois Old Guard” as Jailed Imran Khan Looms Large
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top