New Delhi, India — On a chilly November night last year, Poonam Devi and three other women from her village were surgically sterilized at a health center near their village, Basoli, in India’s Sonbhadra district.
A typical government-run rural health center, that day it was hosting a mass sterilization camp. Women in large numbers — anywhere between 50 and 100 — are lined up and given an approximately five-minute procedure to tie their fallopian tubes.
Devi was one of at least 50 other women who underwent tubectomies that day. At around 8 p.m., she was called into a room for the surgery, made to rest an hour, and sent home.