Voluntary Sterilization – Legal Approaches in Comparative Perspective

Project period: 2026-2028

In many societies, voluntary sterilization is seen as problematic. Reservations manifest themselves in cultural and religious taboos, in ethical objections, and ultimately in state laws. But how do legal systems today defend the position that the genuine and self-reflected intention of an individual is insufficient to legally justify sterilization?

With this comparative research project, we aim to illustrate the ways in which legal systems regulate voluntary sterilization. Our first objective—in a relatively inaccessible field that has thus far received little comparative attention—is to gain a more precise overview of the employed legal instruments along with their justifications. To this end, we will conduct a “classical” comparative legal analysis focusing on a number of systems ranging across multiple continents, but we will also engage in system internal comparison in order to examine how voluntary sterilization is regulated in each case relative to other medical treatments. In this way, we should also acquire a better understanding of just which supra-individual concepts of social order play a role in the regulation of voluntary sterilization and the extent to which they do so.