ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes ethical and social issues raised by population policies that have promoted the surgical sterilization of women in Brazil. It presents a narration about a possible way for a woman to intensively deal with and decide about the dilemmas created by access to reproductive technology. The chapter frames an examination of adoption through a meditation about the Yerma tragedy. It shows how the bioethics principle of autonomy and the feminist "right to choose" cannot be appropriately applied to certain issues in reproduction that concern Brazilian feminists. In 1986 a feminist researcher said that at that time the population of reproductive-age sterilized women in Brazil was as large as the entire population of Belgium. The concept of autonomy, as conceived by feminist groups concerned with health and reproductive rights, can humanize women when they assume an ethical attitude in their erotic, sexual, and reproductive lives through reflection on the experience of becoming a person.
