"You All Don't Need to Have Any More Children"

           In 1967, 21-year-old Sarah Cotton gave birth to her third child at the Mathiesen Clinic in Pittsboro, North Carolina. According to Cotton’s sister Brenda Womble, Cotton’s husband got into an argument with Dr, Mathiesen, who had delivered the child. Cotton’s husband still recalls the doctor’s eerily prescient last words: “you all don’t need to have any more children.” Sarah Cotton never again became pregnant, despite a stated desire to do so.

            The mystery of Sarah Cotton’s sterility was finally solved in 2007, when she began experiencing severe stomach pains. Womble drove her sister to the hospital, where they made a shocking discovery: inside Cotton’s uterus was an IUD (intrauterine device), a mechanical contraceptive. Cotton says that she never knowingly had such a device implanted in her, and the fact that the device had been in her body for almost forty years provides at least circumstantial evidence indicating that Dr. Mathiesen sterilized Cotton without her knowledge and against her will.

            If Dr. Mathiesen did indeed implant the IUD in Cotton without her approval, then he is clearly in the wrong. It cannot be morally acceptable for one human being to unilaterally make such a personal decision about another human being’s body. However, Cotton’s case does raise some interesting ethical questions, especially in light of the eugenics movement that was prevalent in North Carolina at the time of Cotton’s pregnancy and the current issues of resource scarcity that become more and more pressing as the human population expands.

            Firstly, we must ask if it is an inviolable human right to have children. I believe that a case can be made that it is. As animals, we have an innate biological drive to perpetuate our genetic material. No one person’s need is in this case greater than that of any other person’s, and so it stands to reason that we may not restrict the right of one person to have children without calling into question the right of any other person to do so. As mortal creatures, we have a similar drive to be survived and remembered, which again carries no inherently greater weight in the case of one person than another.

We now ask whether there are any limitations to this right. For example, is it the right of every person to have a child at any time and under any circumstances? Is it the right of every person to have as many children as they desire, regardless of whether or not they can support all of them? Both of these questions become increasingly relevant in a world of constrained resources. If a woman cannot support the children she already has, could it be considered child abuse for her to have another child that will take resources away from her current children? At what point do the rights of her children to life outweigh her right to have an additional child, if ever?

Source: “Woman claims doctor secretly sterilized her,” http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/abc11_investigates&id=8546202