Anticreation

[friendless1]

I don't understand the rationale for financially compensating the victims of involuntary sterilization. While the procedures may have caused emotional trauma, it seems unlikely that there was much financial damage. If anything, the inability to procreate can free people from spending many thousands of dollars on food, housing, education, band uniforms, and the other so-called needs of children. Some of the victims already had many children before they were sterilized; it's hard to believe they would not have welcomed the procedure.

In some parts of the world, children provide much-needed labor, but that's rarely true in the U.S. Similarly, there are cultures where children care for their elders, but the American way is to put Mom and Pop in a nursing home, usually at their own expense, and visit them once a week. Yes, I'm pretty sure that the costs of child-rearing outweigh any financial benefit.

That said, some potential monetary consequences of sterilization do come to mind:

1. A person may have been so distraught that he or she sought counseling.
2. A person may have had complications from the surgery that didn't arise until later in life.
3. A person who hoped to be supported by a spouse may have had trouble finding one who was OK with being child-free. This is a pretty flimsy rationale, given that (1) many people are perfectly happy to have no children, (2) most people (men especially) don't depend financially on a spouse, and (3) one can always adopt.
4. Adoption fees may end up being higher than the costs of prenatal care and childbirth. I'm not sure how those compare.

In all of these cases, instead of receiving an arbitrary sum, the victim could submit records documenting the actual loss, e.g., receipts for psychotherapy, medical care, or adoption services. It would be trickier to prove that you'd been deprived of a certain amount of spousal support, but I'm sure some clever attorney could manage it (there goes half your compensation on attorney fees). Of course, any kind of proof could be hard to assemble decades after the fact, especially for victims who have died.

Some may argue that the money is for pain and suffering, but this doesn't make a lot of sense. A major purpose of pain-and-suffering awards is to deter the defendant and future tortfeasors from inflicting the same kind of harm on others. Since no jurisdiction in the U.S. still practices forced sterilization, there's no behavior to deter. And while some victims may have endured a lot of emotional suffering, for others the procedure may have been insignificant. Without knowing exactly how each person was affected, it seems irresponsible to slap the same price tag on each person's suffering.

The more I think about this, the clearer it seems that the intent really is to punish and shame the perpetrators. This is absurd, because the people who believed in and instituted these policies are long gone. During this era of slashed budgets and hiring freezes, government entities can ill afford to be paying huge chunks of money to people who may or may not have suffered.