EDF launches a campaign to end forced sterilisation of persons with disabilities in Europe. Sign the petition!



EDF launches a campaign to end forced sterilisation of persons with disabilities in Europe. Sign the petition!

The European Disability Forum (EDF) has launched a campaign to ask the European Parliament, the Council and European Commission to prohibit forced sterilisation in all EU Member States as a part of the EU Directive on violence against women and domestic violence.  

What is forced sterilisation?

Persons with disabilities, especially women and girls, worldwide have been forced or coerced to submit to permanent and irreversible sterilisation procedures. That is to say removing a person’s capacity to have children against their will. 

There has been a long history in Europe of subjecting women to forced and coerced sterilisation. During the Holocaust, Jewish women were forcibly sterilised by the Nazis. In the decades that followed Roma women and transgender persons also faced being sterilised against their will in Europe. 

Why do we need your signature? It’s happening now!

In Europe today, persons with disabilities, especially women and girls, face forced sterilisation, which only puts them at further risk of abuse.

For years the UN has raised concerns about EU countries still authorising or undertaking forced sterilisation, naming Belgium, Croatia, Czechia, France, Germany, Lithuania and Slovakia. On 8th of March, the European Commission published a proposed law on combating violence against women and domestic violence. This law must prohibit and condemn forced sterilisation. 

We need to convince the European Parliament and Council to forbid forced sterilisation in the law. Less than two years ago, Spain passed a law to end the forced sterilisation of people with disabilities following mass public outrage – we can do it in Europe, too.

#EndForcedSterilisation! Sign up now

No one should be sterilised against their will and have the control over their own bodies taken away from them. The continued and wide-spread practice of forced sterilisation, most often of women and girls with disabilities, must end now. 

Sign up our petition to end forced sterilization