Yesterday the NZ media featured coverage of a new proposal that has been put forward by two “senior” academics from the University of Otago, who would like to see all young New Zealand females temporarily sterilised with long-acting chemical contraceptive implants.

In their ideal vision for the future of New Zealand young people, these academics would like temporary sterilisation to be the default policy that young girls would have to deliberately be opted out of if they didn’t want their new and still-developing fertility to be chemically shut down for months or years at a time.

No, this is not the plot of some dystopian novel or film, this really is a policy that a couple of NZ academics apparently now seriously consider to be a good idea.

To put things mildly: there is a lot to be concerned about with this proposal.

Firstly, these academics don’t seemed to have considered the possible impacts that temporarily sterilising an entire population of females from a very young age could have.

As far as I am aware, no attempt at the population-wide temporary sterilisation of very young females, whose physiology is still new and still developing, has ever been attempted – meaning that the outcome of such an experimental scheme is totally unknown.

We are talking here about synthetic hormonal interference with the female fertility system while that system is still very young and developing, and there is no reliable way of knowing how such interference could turn out (for all of us) in the long-run.

– See more at: http://theleadingedgeblog.com/sterilisation/#sthash.7MaKb99S.dpuf