Dismay as woman discovers her uterus was removed when she was a minor

Bongekile Msibi was over the moon when her boyfriend proposed to her. Soon the two decided to have a baby. After months of trying, they consulted a doctor, and this is when Msibi made a heartbreaking discovery.

“The doctor said it is not only that I can’t conceive, but also that I don’t have a uterus,” Msibi said in her apartment in Boksburg, Ekurhuleni.

In her mind, the doctor’s visit was supposed to be simple. “I assumed the doctor was going prescribe medication for whatever was causing me not to conceive, and that’s it. It would be life as normal.” 

The visit marked the beginning of a traumatic journey.

“It has brought so much sadness into my life. There is no science. There is absolutely nothing that can be done. My uterus is gone.”

No accountability

Msibi was born with a uterus. She gave birth by caesarean section to a healthy baby girl when she was 17. The child was born in a public hospital.

“After I gave birth I was introduced to the three-month injectable contraceptive. The reason I didn’t worry about not getting my period is that my menstrual cycle was never regular, and I assumed it was the side-effects from the contraceptive. Since 2017, I have been spotting and I still spot.”

The doctor she consulted when she was trying to conceive confirmed her uterus had been surgically removed.

“The only time I was in hospital was when I gave birth. I have never been to a hospital before or after. It made sense that my uterus was removed when I was giving birth,” she said.

When she received the news, Msibi was living with her fiancé.

“I told him after three or four days. I remember when I got back I went straight to bed, because I was trying to comprehend the news and didn’t have the strength to tell him. How do you tell someone that you have just been made aware, after so many years, that you don’t have a uterus?”

Her fiancé was shocked, and the news took a toll on their relationship. Though he was supportive, they decided to break off their engagement and part ways because he wanted children.

“I couldn’t be selfish. I wanted to keep him but I know I cannot give him children,” she said.

Msibi went back to the hospital where she gave birth and demanded answers. She said one doctor admitted he was there when the procedure was done. He said Msibi had signed a document that permitted the doctors to remove her uterus.

“I told him I don’t remember doing that, and even if I had done that, it could have been unlawful because I was a minor at that time. I was 17, so it does not count,” she said.

Subsequently, the doctor changed his story and said Msibi’s mother signed the consent forms.

Msibi took her mother to a follow-up meeting with the doctor. “My mother confirmed that she never signed anything. She knows absolutely nothing about my uterus being removed.”

Not having a uterus has dramatically changed Msibi’s life.

“It is sad. In a way I feel my life has been minimised. My life revolves around this one incident. When I meet a man, I have to tell him this is the situation. That gives him the power to either reject or accept me as I am.”

Msibi has written to the health department to help her hold the health professionals who removed her uterus responsible. She said she is disappointed with how the department has responded.

“The department is refusing to be accountable, as if I walked in and removed my own uterus and destroyed my documents. I am a crime scene. What other proof do they need?”

History of forced sterilisation

According to gender, health and medical historian Catherine Burns, the forced sterilisation of women goes back at least 200 years.

“The story does not begin in SA, but what’s very interesting and painful is that it ends up in SA,” she told New Frame.  

Forms of family planning are not a modern practice. For thousands of years, humans have tried to control fertility, and all over the world it is women who are responsible for pregnancy and fertility.

Burns said in the past governments have used eugenics to control population growth and get rid of communities they didn’t want. Nazi Germany used this method against Jews, and extreme right-wing nationals in SA used it to prevent miscegenation (the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial types). 

“In SA the first attack was not on the so-called ‘pure Africans’. The first attack was against coloured people. In Cape Town, race welfare clinics tried to stop coloured people from spreading, as though they were an infection which could infect other people,” Burns said. “The first line of attack was to stop poor white women from having sex with black men to make more coloured people.”

She said the SA government started to target women by giving them barrier methods of birth control, including contraceptive diaphragms and intrauterine devices.

“There are some women who wanted these devices for obvious reasons. They wanted to control their fertility. Governments at that time tried to prevent women from deciding to use contraceptives. They wanted to decide which women should get the contraceptives and which ones shouldn’t. Politics was always linked to fertility control.” 

In the 1940s and 1950s, the South African government targeted what they called the “undeserving poor” for fertility control, Burns said. These people were what the apartheid government described as coloured people, rural black women and white women who fraternised with black people.

In 1966, the government’s population planning programme was mooted at cabinet level.

“They decide to specifically target black women’s fertility,” Burns said. It was always vulnerable women who were targeted by these vicious policies. “If taking a young women’s fertility away for a number of years was a logical and good thing for the government to do, and if it improved women’s health, then why didn’t they target white middle-class women first?” she asked.

In 2014, the KwaZulu-Natal health department said women who received bursaries to pursue pharmacy studies in India would be injected with a contraceptive implant that would prevent them falling pregnant. This was an act of racism and gender discrimination, Burns asserted.

The practice of forced sterilisation of women and of women being forced to take contraceptives to allow them certain opportunities in SA today is the same as what the apartheid regime did.

Shocking report

In February this year, the Commission for Gender Equality released a report that detailed the testimonies of more than 40 mostly HIV-positive black women who claimed to have been forcibly sterilised in public health facilities across the country.

The report said the women gave birth by caesarean section.

“Just before giving birth, but either while in labour or in extreme pain, they were coerced or forced to sign forms that they later learnt were consent forms allegedly permitting the hospital to sterilise them,” the report said.

According to statements from the women, most were humiliated or threatened by health professionals “who told them they would not be attended to if they did not sign the forms”.

Some of the commission’s recommendations included holding a dialogue between the health department and the complainants to find a way to rectify the wrongs. The health department should also print the consent forms in all 11 official languages, and an explanation of the medical procedure should be explained in the patient’s language of choice.

The chairperson of the commission, Tamara Mathebula, said the findings and the recommendations of the report were shared with the health department. She said it asked the commission to provide copies of the medical records and affidavits of the complainants.  

“[The commission] has advised the department of health that the requested affidavits were confidential records and that all requested medical records were within their custody,” Mathebula said. “They have agreed to look into their own records and processes before formulating an informed response on the progress made in implementing the commission’s binding recommendations.” 

A letter of demand has subsequently been issued after the department continued to delay action.

The commission also asked the SA Nurses Union and Health Professionals Council of SA to implement the recommendations and hold the implicated medical professionals accountable.

“We hope that with the co-operation of all parties, the matter can be resolved as soon as possible,” Mathebula said.

Health department spokesperson Popo Maja said provincial health departments have been asked to investigate the allegations. He said the health department will implement the recommendations once there’s a mutual understanding between the department and the commission.

Meanwhile, Msibi has taken legal action against the provincial health department for removing her uterus without her consent. The matter is before the court.

• This article was first published by New Frame