The Guilfordian

Issue date: 3/23/07 Section: World

Media Credit: axiommedia.org The Roma population has typically high birth rate.

"I won't bother to take the baby home, because I wanted a girl," joked a new mother.

"You'd better take it, because you will not have any more children," said her doctor. "We have sterilized you."

These words echo in the ears of Elena Gorolova, a 37-year-old Roma woman who was sterilized at age 21, after giving birth to her first and only child according to The BBC.

Her forced sterilization was a part of a nationwide plan in the Czech Republic to curb the typically high birth rate in its Roma population.

"Sterilization was used as a means of birth control," said Kumar Vishwanathan, a Roma rights activist, to The BBC.

Members of the Roma ethnic group inhabit all areas of the globe but typically live in

Southern and Eastern Europe. As they have no traditional homeland, the Roma, sometimes called Gypsies, have a long history of being persecuted as a means of promoting the national wellbeing of the state.

Gorolova is only one of possibly thousands of Roma women who were sterilized during a period from 1973 to the present. She is also only one of 80 women in her town alone who claim they were either coerced into giving consent for the procedure or simply given one after birth without consenting at all.

Even after 1990, when the program was officially ended by the Czech Republic, women report a similar experience to Gorolova's. Her surgery took place in 1991, and reports have surfaced in recent years of women having the same experience as recently as 2003.

Most surprising about this situation is how it hits close to home for North Carolinians. In 2002, The Winston-Salem Journal ran a comprehensive series exposing the massive eugenics program in North Carolina that, at its end, had its Eugenics Board oversee the forced sterilization of over 7,600 North Carolina residents without granting them any means of legal representation.

Meeting nearby in Raleigh, the Eugenics Board was founded and actively maintained by local economic hero, James G. Hanes.

It consisted of representatives of the attorney general's office as well as the Departments of Mental Health, Public Health, and Public Welfare. All of its members and proponents were considered part of the "local elite" who governed the approval of sterilization - willingly or unwillingly - of thousands of residents, most of them young, female, and black.

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