Dig your teeth into this one folks, coz it’s juicy.

The BBC is reporting that mother of 15-year old Katie Thorpe, who lives in Essex, England, wants her daughter to have a hysterectomy in order to “improve her quality of life”. Katie has quite severe cerebral palsy, and is unable to communicate verbally, which, her mother believes, could make life very embarrassing once she began menstruating. If it goes ahead, it would be the first time a voluntary hysterectomy has been performed in the UK.

Now, whilst I can appreciate the mother’s heart is in the right place, performing this surgery would open up a huge can of worms, and raise ethical questions relating to the ability of people with a severe disability to give informed consent. Scope‘s (the UK’s equivalent to CCS) executive director Andy Rickell raises an important point when he asks what kind of message this kind of operation would be sending in regards to the respect others have for disabled people’s human and reproductive rights. Is it okay for parents to sterilise their children without their consent just because they think the child would be better off? How is this showing any respect whatsoever to the rights of a human being, regardless of whether or not they’re disabled? And then to top it all off, the mother had this to say:

“She’s not going to get married and she’s not going to have children…Katie is not going to become a normal adult”

Gosh. What are your thoughts?

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