As tears roll down her cheeks Sintamani Shankar (25) stares blankly into the picture of her six-year-old son, Pannerselvam. ”It is all that is left of him. The tsunami took him. But there is nothing, not even a picture of my daughter left for me to remember.”
On that Sunday morning last December, the killer waves found many of the children in Nagapattinam at their homes just metres from the sea, rather than at a safer distance, at school. Almost a third of the 6 000 people who died in this fishing village were children.
”My son and daughter were playing on the beach. I only heard the sound, like an aeroplane. I never thought it was the sea. But afterwards my children were gone forever,” says Sinatmani, sitting outside her temporary shelter in Keechankuppan relief camp.
Like so many bereaved mothers in Nagapattinam, which lies on the shoreline of India’s Tamil Nadu state, Sintamani had been sterilised as part of a government-sponsored family planning scheme aimed at cutting India’s soaring population growth.
But local authorities have announced that the state will pay for surgery to reverse the operations, bringing fresh hope for tsunami-affected families consumed by the thought they would never have children again.
Sintamani had the ”recanalisation” operation last month. ”I want a child of my own. Just one is enough.” Her husband says the couples’ lives ”have been empty without kids”.
In Tamil Nadu, many mothers were advised by doctors to undergo sterilisation after their second or third child, and there were cash incentives for those who did so. A mother who decided after two girls to undergo surgery received 20 000 rupees (R2 900).
Anandi Kumar (25) had her sterilisation undone just 20 days ago after losing her three sons in December. Outside her tin shack given by the government, Anandi says family planning was something she had always believed in. ”I thought three kids was enough. But I never knew that something could take all of them at once. Now am I not sure about these operations.”
The surgery, known as a tubectomy, involves cutting a woman’s fallopian tubes and then tying or closing them to prevent pregnancies. When reversed, in a recanalisation, the tubes are simply reconnected. Although the success rate can be as low as 70%, there has been a rush for the reversals.
Part of the reason is a cultural resistance to adoption. ”My relatives would not allow me to adopt a child. They preferred that I had my own,” says Vairam Shekar, who lost her three children in the tsunami, and is waiting to be ”reconnected”.
J Radhakrishnan, Nagapattinam’s district collector, was feted by Bill Clinton when the former US president visited to see how the area was recovering this year, and is seen as the driving force behind the recanalisation scheme. He says adoption is a ”solution for a different set of problems”.
”In Nagapattinam we are faced with a very acute psycho-social issue,” Dr Radhakrishnan says. ”The mindset of people was that they were not only traumatised because they had lost their children but also because they were incapable from having children. Undoing the surgery was really the best answer.”
Officials also point out that the bureaucracy surrounding adoption, designed to protect vulnerable children from unsuitable parents, means that it takes a minimum of a year to adopt in India — too long for many of the grieving parents.
The surgery to reconnect the tubes is expensive by Indian standards, about 25 000 rupees — the equivalent of R3 600. Tamil Nadu, a state of 60-million people, has one of India’s more successful family planning programmes. At present each woman in the state gives birth to two children on average, much below the comparable all India figure of 3,1.
But the tsunami has revealed the downside of such progressive policies, leaving many angry at being robbed of the right to have children, albeit in extreme circumstances.
”I never wanted for my wife to have family planning surgery,” says Laxman Shekar, Vairam’s husband. ”My wife did it and I was angry. Because of the tsunami we have to have another surgery to undo this. We have been cursed.”
K Thilagam, the gynaecologist in Nagapattinam hospital, admits that local people were ”initially very angry with us”. ”They blamed us but now they have calmed down. We have performed more than 30 operations so far and another 120 people have signed up.”
Doctors say they were merely implementing a policy which has proved effective in a country which has struggled to contain a rising population. Medical staff are already considering whether there may be a case for in vitro fertilisation for older women who have lost their children.
”It is being actively considered. After one year, if the recanalisation fails, then we will think about IVF,” says G Venkatachalam, director of Nagapattinam hospital. – Guardian Unlimited Â