Quotes of the Day

As Renata Plachetkova was rushed into the delivery room for the birth of her second child, a nurse thrust a paper in her face, saying, "You must sign. We will tie off your tubes. You won't have more children." Given no time to consider alternatives, and little explanation of the procedure, Plachetkova consented. "I had no choice," she says. "I had to sign."

A 27-year-old mother of two from Svedlar in eastern Slovakia, Plachetkova is one of some 110 Roma women who allege that they were forcibly sterilized in Slovakia's public hospitals since the 1989 fall of communism. The allegations are contained in Body and Soul: Forced Sterilization and Other Assaults on Roma Reproductive Freedom, a report published last week by the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), a New York-based legal advocacy organization. Though the Slovak government pledged to investigate, a spokesman for Pál Csáky, the Deputy Prime Minister responsible for minority rights, dismissed the findings, saying that similar claims had surfaced in the past and none had proved true.

Forced sterilization of the Roma, once known as Gypsies, dates back to the Nazi and communist regimes. But the CRR investigation, based largely on the testimonies of women in Roma settlements across Slovakia, primarily focuses on 110 who were sterilized, or have "strong indications" of having been so, after 1989 when government-sponsored programs targeting the Roma were dismantled. The Roma make up about 9% of Slovakia's population and their treatment is of particular concern to the European Union, which Slovakia is scheduled to join next year. A U.N. report last month described the living conditions of Central Europe's Roma as "closer to those in sub-Saharan Africa than to Europe," singling out Slovakia as the country with the highest rates of unemployment (64%) and social exclusion among Roma.

Representatives of four maternity wards cited in the CRR report and contacted by Time said the allegations were untrue and biased. "It's a load of nonsense," says Stefan Pitko, head of a maternity ward in Spisska Nova Ves, eastern Slovakia. "The Roma in this district make up 14% of the population yet account for 46% of births. If we sterilized them the way the report suggests, they couldn't bear so many children."

Claude Cahn, programmes director at the European Roma Rights Center, a Budapest-based human-rights group, claims the report's findings were substantiated by his center's research. "We are looking at a difference in degree rather than of kind," Cahn says. "There is a particularly strong public discourse about curbing the growth rate of the Romany population in Slovakia, but issues like lack of informed consent apply to a number of countries in Central Europe."

According to the report, health care workers throughout eastern Slovakia, a part of the country with the highest concentration of Roma, still fail to obtain informed consent or to advise Roma patients of other options, such as contraceptives. Their actions, the report contends, are fueled by fears, widespread in Slovakia, of Roma overpopulation, as well as the belief of many Slovak doctors that repeat deliveries via caesarean section can be dangerous — hence the recommended sterilization after two or three such deliveries. Indeed, the CRR finds that medical practitioners "appeared to unnecessarily and irresponsibly perform C-sections on Romany women at least in part as a pretext for sterilizing them."

The CRR also reports "systematic and glaring racial discrimination" in maternity wards and gynecology departments, Roma women often being prohibited from using even the same toilets and dining facilities as other patients. "It's a racist policy and I think it is conducted with the tacit support of the government," says Ina Zoon, a Madrid-based minority-rights consultant who worked on the report. "If the government doesn't know, it's incompetent; if it does, it is covering up."

Plachetkova didn't experience segregation during the birth of her two daughters, but she does believe that Slovak doctors conspire to prevent Roma women from having more children. Three years after Plachetkova was sterilized, she approached her gynecologist for reverse surgery that would allow her to conceive again, only to discover that while being sterilized, her uterus had also been removed. "When my doctor told me, I couldn't stand up," she says. "I knew that I agreed to sterilization, but there was never ever any discussion of losing my uterus as well." Given the importance of human rights to Slovakia's E.U. membership, cases like Plachetkova's can't be ignored.

• JAN STOJASPAL
• Reports of the forced sterilization of Roma women echo Slovakia's dark past