Having children is a privilege

Footnote: Responses to the two most likely objections to sterilisation

(1) Any practice which changes the structure of human tissue in unwilling people must be totally unacceptable in a civilised society.

There are occasions when the public at large in “civilised society” could not care less.

The Vietnam War was a useless, dishonourable, and destructive war in which the state conscripted unwilling young Australians to place their bodily tissue in a position where it could be restructured by bullets and shrapnel. The political party responsible for that conscription continued to be re-elected

Under the Mental Health Act, you can be held down while a drug is injected into you which, when done on a regular basis, can permanently affect your brain structure. In this country, we are partially destroying minds so that we can control them. We are doing this simply because we do not have the resources for psychotherapy.

Abortion is a surgical procedure, and there are shades of grey in what is supposed to be free choice. Pregnant women are now tested for Down ’s syndrome. If the result is positive, the woman almost invariably undergoes the necessary surgery. But how would her husband, family and friends treat her if she changed her mind?

(2) Children are abused at all socio-economic levels. There would be a tendency to focus on the lowest which would be discriminatory. There could even be the sterilisation of Indigenous men on a mass scale.

Simply being devalued can have devastating emotional affects on a child. This occurs at all socio-economic levels. Sexual abuse can also occur at every socio-economic level. But, it is on the lowest socio-economic level where there is the greatest domestic stress and where the most brutal violence is almost exclusively occurring. In this situation, discrimination is the lesser evil.

While there is now debate over what is fact, the establishment’s fear that the close supervision of Indigenous communities would appear discriminatory, may have left Indigenous children open to being sexually abused on an almost incomprehensible scale.

Those who raise the possibility of mass sterilisation of a particular class of people are the types who feel wise when they point to worst-case scenarios which in reality have a near-zero probability of occurring. The introduction of limited and highly selective mandatory sterilisation would likely be enough to set other wheels of change into motion - which have been in need of a kick-start.