However, the Carters decided not to go ahead with the procedure as it would have to be repeated. Instead they applied for Sophie to have a hysterectomy. The Guardianship Tribunal approved it and when Sophie was 21 she had the operation. Her limited independence is no longer compromised by menstruation, Merren said. Sophie continues to take swimming lessons without monthly interruptions and doesn’t have to have pap smears, under general anesthetic, which many of Sophie’s friends have to endure.

The Carters consider themselves lucky. The Guardianship Tribunal concluded that the potential distress to Sophie’s spiritual, mental, and physical health caused by menstruation justified the procedure. However, many of Sophie’s mentally handicapped friends have had similar applications rejected and some have gone overseas, to New Zealand or Thailand, for hysterectomies.

It is likely to get even more difficult for Australian parents in situations like the Carters’ to get approval for sterilizing a disabled child. A July Senate committee report recommended that sterilizing disabled children without their consent should be banned unless it can be proven that the child is never likely to develop the capacity for consent. The report also recommended that taking children or attempting to take children overseas for a sterilization procedure should be a criminal offense.

The report followed a 10-month inquiry, with submissions from parents, carers, human rights groups, and disability advocates. The committee’s list of 28 recommendations include that the definition of an individual’s capacity to consent be identical in every Australian state and territory, and that sex education information be targeted at the disability sector.

In one of the recommendations, the committee said that it “abhors” suggestions that sterilization should be used to manage pregnancy risks due to sexual abuse.

Sterilizing disabled people exudes more than a whiff of eugenics. It recalls U.S. policies in the 20th Century that led to the sterilization of more than 60,000 people by 1960, as well as the infamous Nazi “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,” in 1933. But due to difficulty with menstrual management or a fear of pregnancy, carers often feel that sterilization is their only option. A 2003 study in the journal Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews about the ethics of involuntary sterilization of mentally handicapped people examined surveys from the 1980s and 1990s and found that roughly half of all parents with mentally disabled children have considered or would consider sterilizing their child. These decisions are often controversial. The 2006 Seattle “Ashley Treatment” case, in which a hysterectomy, among other procedures, was used to stunt the growth of a six-year-old girl, who had static encephalopathy, is still contentious. Her parents decided on these treatments to ease the burden of caring for her.

“Most parents have mixed motives,” said Douglas Diekema, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital, who wrote the study. “Clearly many of them do want some help with menstrual control, but they really, almost all of the time desperately want their child never to get pregnant… They are concerned about sexual abuse and their child been taken advantage of. Although a sterilizing procedure doesn’t do anything to alter that possibility, what it does do is that it prevents, in their mind, a pregnancy on top of that.”

U.S. laws also vary from state to state. Diekema says that, generally, getting approval for the procedure is “fairly restrictive” throughout the country. Much like in Australia, the rate at which sterilization in disabled populations occurs is unknown. At the Seattle Children’s Hospital, Diekema says one or two procedures are approved a year. Carolyn West, a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and professional member of the New South Wales Guardianship Tribunal, said that approximately one to three procedures are approved yearly in the state. One of the committee’s recommendations is to record the number of child sterilization cases in Australia “in the same way in each jurisdiction.” Even though the exact number of procedures are hazy, the figures seem to have been high enough to have caught the attention of the United Nations, which in its 2012 Conventions on the Rights of the Child Report, wrote that they were “particularly concerned” that the sterilization of disabled women and girls continues in Australia and advised that the practice be banned for non-therapeutic purposes. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture has highlighted that forced sterilization of disabled women may constitute torture, or ill treatment. Submissions to the Australian Senate inquiry detailed some distressing instances of forced sterilization. One woman’s father, who believed that she should not have children, told her she was going to the hospital to have her tonsils taken out. “I did not have a sore throat afterwards,” she told the committee. It was only when she was trying to have kids with a long-term partner that she had realized what happened. Her partner eventually left her because he wanted children. Another woman was forced to have a hysterectomy by her parents, even though she told them that she did not want to have the operation. Another disabled woman who was sterilized collected more than 100 strollers, as well as diapers, toys, and clothes for children that she would never have.

Stella Young, a comedian and disability advocate who suffers from osteogenesis imperfecta, a congenital bone disorder, wrote in her submission that a specialist tried to convince her parents that a hysterectomy would be best for her, to avoid the “inconvenience” of menstruation. Young was just four years old at the time. “My parents, to whom I’m eternally grateful, were horrified and rejected this ‘advice,’” Young wrote.