Poor subjected to 'Nazi' experiments

It is chilling to think that in our country, which has a constitution which enshrines human rights, we could have seen forced medical procedures on people which echoed the ghastly experiments the Nazis carried out on Holocaust victims at Auschwitz concentration camp.

If that seems hysterical, then consider this: hundreds of HIV-positive women, all of them black and from poor areas, were effectively forcibly sterilised by the state during our government's campaign against Aids in the 1990s and 2000s.

This campaign to remove the uteruses of HIV-positive women - presumably in order to stop the transmission of the virus from mother to child - continued until last year, according to a study recently completed by researchers at Unisa.