Women's eNews recently reported a new trend in Czech health care: the forced sterilization of Roma women.
The Roma population, an oft-persecuted minority group in the Czech Republic and elsewhere, has always endured intense discrimination. But this is nuts. Turns out, at least 70 Roma women in the Czech Republic have come forward claiming they were sterilized -- without their consent -- while receiving OB/GYN care at state-run hospitals. The objective of these procedures, they claim, was an attempt at ethnic cleansing.
According to Women's eNews, the Czech health ministry has now introduced legislation that would more tightly regulate all medical consent procedures as well as restricting sterilization. The bill is still in its early stages and not yet approved by the Cabinet.
To learn more about discrimination against Romas, click here.
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Dreadful. But not unique, unfortunately.
Another example which comes to mind is that of the Indian Health Service, which in the 1970s secretly and involuntarily sterilized more than 40% of Indian women of childbearing age -- right here in the good ol' US of A.
Check it out:
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/tbacig/studproj/is3099/nahealth/paper.html
Forced or coerced sterilization of Roma women is actually not a new trend in Central and Eastern Europe (I wrote my senior thesis on Roma rights). It's been going on since at least WWII, if I remember correctly. The European Roma Rights Center has section devoted to Roma women's rights.