I must obey The Guardian.
It contains the commands of Chatham House.
Those words must be obeyed.
The Guardian is to be believed as much as The New York Times is to be believed.
I can’t prevent you from jumping to conclusions, but I can try to make you aware that you are tarring the entire State of Israel based on a headline that does not match the facts in the story, and you ridicule an article that does.
The story seems to be that for years the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, a Jewish philanthropy that has been helping Ethiopian Jews to Israel, has been administering depo-previra to Fulash Mura women en route to Israel from Ethiopia. These are people who are baly discriminated against in Ethiopia and they represent the only time in recorded history in which oppressed black Africans have been rescued from that continent to live as free people elsewhere.
As part of the healthcare administered to the immigrants the JDC administers a temporary (3-month) contraceptive. The JDC maintains that it is voluntary and administered after it is explained (informed consent) and at least a few women over a period of years have said that they didn’t understand that it was a contraception or were made to feel that it was a necessary condition to their being permitted to immigrate to Israel. Apparently depo-previra is widely used bgy welfare organizations that administer aid to African people in that area, and perhaps the JDC people learned it from the other aid workers.
I don’t like the idea that they may have administered depo-previra without fully explaining its effects or that they coerced people to take it, but it is a 3-month contraceptive that is generally recognized as safe and with no lasting effects either on the woman’s ability to give birth or on any other aspects of her health that I could find. This is NOT Margaret Sanger-type forced sterilization.
In any case, as soon as an Israeli television program highlighted the practice in December the JDC spokespeople issued a denial of coercion/inadequate explanation.
Now the Israeli government has said that it wants to discontinue prescriptions of depo-previra to Ethiopian immigrant women in Israel pending the results of an investigation, and for its own reasons this news service has chosen to headline the article with a libel that the Israeli government has admitted to guilt. It looks to me that they don’t want to administer a drug to anyone without their consent and they are right to place these prescriptions on hold, even though it will cause hardship to those women who will find their own prescriptions unable to be renewed.
I am having a difficult time imputing innocent motives to the headline writer who took the practices of the JDC, the allegations of coercion, and the Israeli government’s efforts to stop any coercion that may be happening, and wrote a headline claiming that Israel’s government has admitted guilt.
And for those of you who compare this to forced sterilization, you should read before you write.