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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (19376)	2/28/2003 6:03:21 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Refreshing news from New Europe.... February 28, 2003 Gypsies in Slovakia Complain of Sterilizations By PETER S. GREEN RESOV, Slovakia - The morning after Zita, a young Gypsy mother, gave birth to her second child at age 17, a nurse shoved a piece of paper in front of her. Zita, who is illiterate, says she marked three crosses on the paper, and thus unwittingly agreed to be sterilized. "I don't know what was there," Zita said. "I can't read. I don't care what was on it, because I was in pain." That was on Feb. 6, 1998. Today Zita is a slim 22-year-old with a sad, shy smile and not much of a future. She and her husband, Krystian, live on the outskirts of this eastern Slovak city in what is commonly called a Gypsy settlement - actually a shantytown of shipping containers and wattle-and-daub huts with no running water. When a second nurse told her she would no longer be able to have children, Zita recalled, "I started to cry and I screamed for the doctor." Among Slovakia's poorest Gypsies, it is a woman's habit - in the eyes of most, their duty - to have many children, and women often have half a dozen or more by the time they are in their late 20's. According to a team of foreign and Slovak investigators for the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, which published a report last month, doctors in eastern Slovakia have sterilized at least 110 young Gypsy women against their will since the fall of Communism in 1989. The most recent case they documented in visiting only 40 of Slovakia's 600 Gypsy communities was last fall, and the investigators suggest that despite strenuous denials from doctors, the practice continues. "Roma women are being sterilized against their will and without their consent, and it's a violation of their rights," said Barbara Bukovska, a lawyer with the Counseling Center for Citizenship and Civil and Human Rights in Prague, and an adviser to the Center for Reproductive Rights. Slovak doctors deny any form of discrimination, noting that Gypsy women rarely visit doctors before birth and often have infections, in part because of the conditions in which they live. "Why would we do that?" Dr. Marian Kysely, head of the obstetric ward at J. A. Reiman Hospital, said when asked about the reported sterilizations. The report says a number of Gypsies - or Roma, as they call themselves - were involuntarily sterilized or coerced into agreeing to sterilization in Dr. Kysely's clinic, but he denied that. "We have no interest to do it," he said, noting that a quarter of the children born in his ward are Gypsies. "Whether they are Roma or white, we do everything to have a healthy population." "The Roma from the settlements have no toilets, no showers," Dr. Kysely said. "They are different from the point of view of hygiene." Some Gypsy women who complain of coerced sterilization, he said, may be suffering from untreated gynecological problems. In its report, the Center for Reproductive Rights said it had uncovered "clear and consistent patterns" that showed doctors and nurses in eastern Slovakia "are complicit in the illegal and unethical practice of sterilizing Romany women without obtaining their consent." [...] nytimes.com