Sterilizing the undesirables:

As the Czech government has acknowledged in recent years in the wake of critical reports by human rights organizations, Roma--who are also known by the denigrating "gypsy" label--are subject to widespread discrimination in the Czech Republic and elsewhere in the Eastern Europe.

A recent survey publicized widely in the Czech Republic found that nearly 80 percent of Czechs would not want a Roma as a neighbor. The Roma unemployment rate hovers around 90 percent and very few attend university or even high school as most are shuttled from childhood into special schools for the mentally disabled.

Government experts estimate that Roma comprise approximately 1 percent to 2 percent of the 10.2 million people living in the Czech Republic. A great number of Roma live in municipal housing projects that are in deplorable conditions, often with broken windows and decaying interiors.

Concerns that Roma women were sterilized without their consent in post-Communist Czech Republic were raised by Roma advocacy groups in the 1990s, but it was not until earlier this year that actual victims--encouraged by several Roma advocacy groups--began to talk publicly about their experiences and demand justice.

It was common practice during the communist era for Czechoslovakia to sterilize women the government deemed undesirables, and this meant Roma, said Claude Cahn, program director at the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest, which first helped bring the 70 women's cases to the government's attention.

Could you be considered undesirable? Might some people in power just love the idea of preventing you from reproducing? When you consider this side of the coin, does state-controlled reproduction sound like such a great idea?

If the state can ban abortion, it can mandate abortion ... and sterlization.

So when it comes to reproductive rights, who should decide? You? Or Tom DeLay?

About author

media girl also blogs at other places.