ABSTRACT
In 2005, a committee investigating the impact of segregation policies on leprosy-affected people in Japan in the period 1907 to 1996 discovered 114 foetuses from leprosy-affected women preserved in formalin and stored in leprosy sanatoria throughout the country. 2 The committee reported that these remains resulted from ‘artificial abortions, natural miscarriages, and artificially-induced births’. 3 On the basis of a detailed medical examination, the committee determined that 29 of the foetuses had been more than 32 weeks of age from conception, and amongst those, 16 would have been born at 36 weeks. Therefore at least 25 per cent of the bodies could not have been the result of abortions, but must have been early induced births or natural, full-term births. Eighty per cent of the total did not bear any marks of trauma or surgical cuts so the committee concluded that some of the babies would have been born alive. Logically it seemed that those, at least, had been killed at birth. The committee speculated on what had probably happened:
if a foetus was born alive, the question is how the life was stopped after the birth. It is extremely difficult now to speculate how it was done, but there are some cases where the only imaginable thing is, at least for some newborn babies, that workers at sanatoria were committing murders in the sense of the Penal Law. Further to this, there are several testimonies that confirm such facts. 4
