PLA1~NED PARENTHOOD BEHIND THE CURTAlN: 

POPULATION POLICY AND STERILIZATION OF ROMANI WOMEN 

IN COMMUNIST CZECHOSLOVAKIA, 1972-1989 

Vera Sokolowi, Charles University 

Introduction 	 fulfill in order to be granted permission to 
undergo the procedure (Vestnik MZ CSR and

In 1990, Tibora Vallkova explained why both 
Vestnik MZ SSR 1972). However, based on

of her children were in foster-care institutions. 
this protective law, between 1972 and 1990 

She attempted to commit suicide when her 
Romani women were sterilized at ' 

partner left her after he learned she had been 
astonishingly high numbers compared to non­

sterilized four years earlier, in 1986. She got 
Romani women. Even though there are no 

2,000 crowns l for the sterilization, but 
decisive statistics available, several estimates 

immediately she gave the money to her social 
claim that anywhere from 21.2 to 36.6 percent 

worker as a debt-payment for used children's 
of all sterilized women were Romani, while 

clothes. Now, she is in therapy. One of 
the Roma constituted less than two percent ofTibora's sisters was sterilized after she had 
the overall Czechoslovak population had her first child, when she was nineteen. 
(Posluchova and Posluch 1989, Pellar and Her other sister jumped out of a window after 
Andrs 1990).3 Since the collapse of the

she had been sterilized. "She died," states 
communist regime in 1989, at least three Tibora absent-mindedly (Mazalova 1997)? 
hundred Romani women came forward to 

Rumors about sterilization of Romani women 
~artic~pate 1n various surveys, studies, and in communist Czechoslovakia were born in 
mtervlews. All of them claimed they were the early 1970s. By the end of the decade, the 
sterilized against their will or with ill­rumors were baptized into a world of 
informed consent. All of them also claimed legitimate controversy by the ink of dissident 
that they were offered money for the 

writers criticizing the Czechoslovak "inability 
procedure. Invariably, in their testimonies the to deal with the 'Gypsy question'," and 
women (and Roma advocates by their side) 

medical experts, explaining the politics of 
accused the "regime" of explicitly targeting encouragement of sterilization among 
them for sterilization, citing the 1972 "women of Gypsy origin" (Charta 77 1979; 

also Mohapl and Dobesova 1978, Kubica et 
a1. 1978). However, vocalized concerns about 

3 Statistics concerning the number of sterilized Roma 
the issue remained rare. women vary tremendously. All authors agree that their 

numbers were "disproportionately high," but there is no 
In 1972, the Health Ministries of both federal consensus on how high. The percentages fluctuate by 
republics of communist Czechoslovakia years as well. The statistics of Pellar and Andrs, for 
issued a new Sterilization Law, designed to example, consist of interviews and questionnaires givcn 

to 156 Roma women in Slovakia and 123 Roma women prevent arbitrary and ill-informed sterilization 
in the Czech Republic. 

of all Czechoslovak citizens. The law outlined 
4 Interes~ingly, one of the very first books published byspecific and strict requirements and 
t!le first mdependent Romani publishing house Romani 

indications that a sterilization applicant had to Chib was Ilona Ferkova's Znicila si zivot pro penize­
Mosa~d'a peske 0 diivipen anglo love (She Destroyed 
Her LIfe for Money). The fact-based novel is a story 

I 2,000 Czechoslovak crowns in 1986 represented the about the trauma of sterilization, whose main character, 
low end of an average monthly salary (and the a young Romani woman, "succumbed to the high 
equivalent of about $40 USD.) financial seduction [of sterilization] and secretly got rid 
2 The personal testimonies used throughout this paper of her womanhood." The consequences of the procedure 
are based on oral interviews with Roma women who destroy her lite and marriage. TIle pUblication indicates 
underwent sterilization (and who wish to remain how important the issue of sterilization is in the 
anonymous), conducted in summer 1997 by Dana collective memory of Romani community'S (and 
Mazalova. Accordingly, the names of the women used especially Romani women's) recollections of the 
in this paper were changed by the author. communist era. 

79 



Sterilization Decree as the cornerstone of the 
practice (Gina 1989, Mazalova 1997, Charta 
77 1979). 

The 1972 law is, however, on paper, strictly 
ethnicity-neutral. There is no mention of 
"Gypsies" or ethnicity in general, anywhere in 
the text. There is also no mention of financial 
compensation for the procedure. This seeming 
paradox raises some important questions. 
How did it happen that an ethnically neutral 
law resulted in an ethnically inscribed 
practice? And what does the "regime" signify 
in the women's testimonies? Some scholars 
argue that because "the incidence [of 
sterilization in communist Czechoslovakia] is 
statistically insignificant" in terms of the total 
number of procedures, it is not worthy of 
attention (Kirk, Livi-Bacci and Szabady 1976; 
David and McIntyre 1981; Heitlinger 1987). 
However, given the involuntary nature of 
many of the procedures and their ethnic 
aspect, I believe the sterilization practice 
carries considerable importance for exposing 
the ways in which discrimination against the 
Roma during the communist regime was 
carried out. Significantly, it further 
illuminates a critical dimension of the 
transformation of the "Gypsy question" in 
Czechoslovakia from a discourse on ethnicity 
to a discourse of social deviance and 
sexuality. Moreover, the circumstances 
surrounding the sterilization practice also hold 
tremendous potential for uncovering some of 
the sites where the tensions between the 
majority Czechoslovak population and the 
Romani minority played out in the most 
striking ways. 

Unlike "Czechoslovak" women (meaning 
ethnically non-Roma) who were never paid 
for sterilization, Romani women (legally also 
Czechoslovak citizens) were lured into 
consent by substantial financial incentives. 
Beta Kolarova was 27 years old and had two 
children when she was persuaded by her 
social worker that a 10,000 crown 
compensation for the procedure is too good an 
offer to pass up (Mazalova 1997:38). The 
calendar said 1990. The leather-jacketed 
dissidents from Charter 77, cheered on by 
excited crowds, had already seized power at 

the Prague castle, and the five-pronged star 
above the lion's head on the Czech national 
symbol was replaced by the original royal 
crown, but the sterilization of Romani women 
was still going on. One is left wondering, 
why? How was it possible in the first place 
and why did it continue even after the 
communist regime, supposedly dictating and 
controlling all aspects of the society and its 
actions, was gone? If the policies were born in 
the hands of the "regime" and executed by the 
"regime," why did not they also die with the 
"regime" (Cohen 1985, Kaplan 1987, Matynia 
1996)?5 

It is clear from the testimonies of the 
sterilized women, as well as from interviews 
with and documents written by local doctors 
and social workers, that much of the initiative 
to urge, or even pursue Romani women to 
undergo sterilization came from these local 
offices. Despite the official rhetoric of ethnic 
equality, and contrary to the official 
assurances that race was a groundless tool for 
explaining social reality in communist 
Czechoslovakia, these regional workers 
interpreted the 1972 ethnicity-neutral 
Sterilization Decree as a mandate to sterilize 
Romani women and readily escorted them 
into operating rooms. By analyzing the 
interpretation and implementation of the 
official policies by ordinary bureaucrats 
sitting in local hospitals and offices, this 
article further promotes the thesis that the 
commonplace dichotomy between "regime" 
versus "people" is not a conceptually 
meaningful framework for understanding 
social and political practices under East 
European communism. 

5 The most obvious answer lies, of course, in the lag in 
policy change that comes with any transformation of a 
regime. The fact that the involuntary sterilization of 
Romani women stopped within a few years of the end of 
communist rule does seem to be an indication of its 
connection with a change of the political system. An 
example of this phenomenon can be seen, for example, 
in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in the 
Soviet Union (Cohen 1985); after the Victorious 
February 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia (Kaplan 1987); 
or in other areas of political and social transformations 
in Eastern Europe after 1989 (Matynia 1996.) 

80 



I 

I 

I 


By jettisoning that dualism - itself a heritage and discusses its various dimensions, ranging 
of totalitarian conceptions of communist 
societies - one can better see that the locus of 

• 
"power" was less embedded in the 
proclamations of ethnically neutral Party 
decrees than it was situated within the 
discursive arena of local officials who 

•• 
interpreted and implemented laws as they saw 
fit. Focus on low-level officials thus reveals 
the complicated and dynamic nature of 
internal social reality that was pulsing behind 
the seemingly stoic and uniform face of the 
communist regime. In sum, the "invisibility" 

• 
of the discrimination of Romani women 

• 
resides in the fact that the ethnic target of the 
sterilization policy was never fully enunciated 
from above nor fully institutionalized, but was 
rather always implicitly understood to refer to 
Romani women by local practitioners who 
inhabited a dual world between "official" 

• discourse and unofficial racial bias, and thus 
who were themselves unable to see the 
racially charged nature of their actions. The 

• 
key to unpacking the ethnic dimension of the 
seemingly impartial social system is, 
therefore, to explore the intricate relationship 

• 
between official rhetoric, institutional 

• 
policies, and popular consciousness. These 
relationships informed each other and together 
created the mechanisms of social control that 
enabled the discrimination of Czechoslovak 

• 
Roma to flourish under the guise of social 
welfare. 

The article is organized into three main parts. 

• 
The first section introduces the genesis of the 
1972 Sterilization Law by situating it in the 

• 
context of the transformation of the 
Czechoslovak population policy in the 1970s. 
The section then goes on to examine the 

• 
relationship between Czechoslovak 
perceptions of "Gypsy" parenthood and 
sexuality. The second part ofthe article 
focuses on the writings of medical 
professionals, revealing the presence of 
"enlightened racism" in their argumentation, 

•• 
hidden under the rhetoric of health and socio­
economic welfare not only of the Roma but 
the entire country. Finally, the third section of 
the article turns the lens on the inevitably 
gendered nature of the sterilization practice 

• 


from violation to empowerment. 

I. Czechoslovak Population Policy 

Like all others in the Eastem bloc, during the 
1970s and 1980s Czechoslovak officials 
nervously watched its slowly and steadily 
declining birth rate, encouraging its 
population to have more children. During the 
late 1960s, countries of Eastern Europe 
experienced some of the lowest fertility rates 
in the world (Fischer 1985: 125).6 By 1968, 
the total fertility rate in Slovakia reached its 
lowest-ever recorded level. In the Czech 
Republic, fertility levels resembled the 
statistics from the 1930s (Frejka 1980:69). 
Even though these trends were reversed 
during the 1970s, all countries of the Eastern 
bloc continued in their effort to promote 
comprehensive pro-natalist measures 
(Heitlinger 1987:15). The 1972 Sterilization 
Law, as an improved version of the initial 
sterilization regulation passed in 1966, was a 
part of this effort to refine the Czechoslovak 
population policy into what by the mid-1970s 
became, according to some western 
demographers, "the best, most comprehensive 
pro-natalist population policy in the 
developed world" (Besemeres 1980:263). 

After the establishment of the Czechoslovak 
Population Commission in 1957 in the wake 
of the liberalization of abortion in the country, 
Czechoslovakia engaged in a conscious effort 
to counter its rapidly falling birth rates. 
Following the lead of the Soviet Union in 
1955, abortion was legalized in 
Czechoslovakia in 1957 and on the whole was 
considered "neither sinful nor disgraceful" 
(Heitlinger 1985:289). Despite that, media 
pamphlets and educational brochures engaged 
in pro-natalist rhetoric, "in the interest of the 
nation," throughout the entire communist 
period. Unlike Romania, for example, where 
the state involvement in reproduction 
amounted to a virtual abolition of abortion in 

6 However, abortions remained legal in all countries of 
the Eastern bloc, with the exception of Romania where 
abortion was made illegal in 1966. Nicolae Ceaw;escu 
even ordered a "requirement" for every family to have at 
least four children. 

81 



1966, in Czechoslovakia the regime enacted 
incentive-based, "positive" social and medical 
pro-natalist measures (Kligman 1998). 

In 1964, the regime introduced prolonged 
maternity leaves, increased family allowances 
for every additional child in a family, gave 
preferential treatment in housing based on 
number of children, made reductions in rent, 
and encouraged early retirement for mothers 
(they were entitled up to 35 weeks of paid and 
three years of unpaid maternity leave, and for 
every child raised, a mother was entitled to 
one year off of the mandatory retirement age, 
set at 60 for women and 65 for men) 
(Heitlinger 1987:243, Frejka 1980:69, 
Heitlinger 1985:289). The official recognition 
of the sexual division oflabor (including 
parenthood) within the domestic sphere, 
demonstrated by this entitlement to an early 
retirement for women who raised children, 
points to the complex relationship between 
the regime's paternalistic sexism and its 
commitment to women's emancipation. By 
the late 1970s, the Czechoslovak government 
was spending four percent of its annual 
budget on direct financial benefits awarded to 
mothers and an additional seven percent on 
other pro-natalist services and subsidies 
(David and McIntyre 1981 :222). The new 
Sterilization Law then was an integral 
component of this drive to perfect the pro­
natalist popUlation policy system. 

In 1989, an influential study, Law and 
Modern Medicine, summarized the official 
position on the concept of family and 
reproduction politics in Czechoslovakia 
during the communist period: 

The succession of generations is the 
only means for the preservation of the 
human family and is, in its way, the 
primary task of humanity. Bearing 
children is thus the unquestionable 
duty of parents, regardless of their 
wishes and plans. Even children not 
wanted [initially] often become 
children loved. (Stepan 1989:153) 

The Czechoslovak Civic Law, anchored in the 
1960 Czechoslovak Constitution, considered 
the "establishment of a family and a proper 

upbringing of children [to be] the purpose of 
marriage," and "motherhood the most 
honorable obligation of a woman" (Ustava 
CSSR 1960). While the rhetoric of the 
population policy was consistently both pro­
natalist and free of any explicit ethnic 
prejudice, the early 1970s witnessed a marked 
shift in the concern and emphasis of the 
Czechoslovak population policy. Since the 
late 1960s, the state was becoming 
increasingly focused on what two leading 
Czechoslovak demographers at the time 
called, "the qualitative aspect of population 
development" (Pavlik and Wynnyczuk 
1974:320). 

The so-called Normalization period of the 
early 1970s, following the unsuccessful 
attempt of political reformers to build 
"socialism with a human face" during the 
Prague Spring of 1968, witnessed an abrupt 
shift in official discourse, and therefore also 
in social policy. In the realm of population 
policy, Czechoslovakia was gradually more 
concerned with the "proper care" of its 
children than simply with their sheer numbers 
(David and McIntyre 1981, Heitlinger 1987). 
In other words, the state became increasingly 
interested in the "quality" of the population 
and its reproductive practices than the overall 
"quantity" of the population, a shift that 
directly targeted the Roma as "contaminating" 
the gene pool through their culture of 
deviance (Berent 1970). In 1968, another 
prominent demographer pointed out the 
"cultural disadvantages of children raised in 
very large families" and noted the headaches 
revolving around constructing "inordinately" 
large apartments (Kucera 1968). While the 
main emphasis of the population policy 
remained loyal to a wide range of medical, 
economic, and social measures, a 1974 study 
argued that "education to proper parenthood 
[as well] must become an integral part of 
Czechoslovak state population policy as a 
whole" (Pavlik and Wynnyczuk 1974:320). 

The most significant turning point for this 
discursive shift came at the National 
Demographic Conference in May 1970. Here, 
for the first time, Czechoslovak demographers 
urged the state to "increase demands for the 

82 



2 

I 

I qualitative makeup of the population" because 

"current trends indicate that such a 

I development is slowing down" (Cerny 
1970:318). The official treatise from the 
conference listed as the main source of the 

I problem "the population explosion of the 

I 
gypsy population," in parentheses adding "the 
growth of inadequately adjustable individuals 
from gypsy families." At the same time, the 
document cited "the quantitative decrease of 
the birth rate" in the country as a cause for 
serious concern, making it explicit that the 

I "gypsy" birthrate, was not treated as an 
integral part of the overall "Czechoslovak" 
birth rate. The demographers then warned that 

I if this trend [the "explosion of gypsy 
population"] continues it would "result in the 
impairment (zhorSem) of the qualitative 

I composition of the national gene pool 

II 
(genofond) in terms of mental abilities 
(dusevni schopnosti)" and argued that 
Czechoslovakia should start "utilizing' special 
methods' for regulating fertility in our 
healthcare" and attempting to "gradually and 
objectively merge sociological and genetic 
categories in the population" (Cerny 
1970:318-319). Gradually, policy focus on 
"respectability" and "quality" of children,

I family environment, and parenting gained full 
primacy in conjunction with the rise of the 
rhetoric of social deviance and pathology as 
both the new conceptualization of the 

II 
population policy and the mechanism of 
articulating Romani difference (Olrnrova 
1973:l7)? 

Concerned about the quality of the family 
environment, officials gradually modified the 

I 

population policy to provide only limited 
encouragement to large families, the majority 
of whom were Roma. Since 1970, attention 
was concentrated on stimulating second and 
third-order births, which were seen as crucial 
to a population policy seeking to reverse a 

I 
7 Thematically, in sheer numbers of studies published in 
Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, the great majority are 
conccrned with "Gypsy" education, followed by studies 
in "social difference and deviance" (physical 
anthropology, criminality and justice, and pathological 
psychology), reflecting the changing trend of the 
regimc's approach to the "Gypsy question." 

declining feltility rate. In the interest of a 
"healthy" population, the family allowance 
was adjusted upward for the first three births, 
but, in contrast to earlier years, reduced for 
higher numbers (Demografie 1986,1974). In 
1978, demographer Jin Havelka pointed out 
that the government's present population 
policy was less concerned with increasing the 
birthrate than in maintaining it at its current 
level, while concentrating on issues of "the 
best possible rearing and education of 
children" (Havelka 1978:31). 

While the population policy did not engage in 
any explicit ethnic bias, there is, of course, an 
implicit judgment present in its statements 
about the quality of population, proper 
parenthood, or appropriately sized families. 
These statements must be read in connection 
with the officially marketed and popularly 
reproduced images of a "Gypsy" not as an 
ethnic and cultural subject, but as a socially, 
mentally, and sexually deviant object. These 
images, displayed most often in educational 
and welfare propaganda, drew on exaggerated 
and caricatured differences in sexual, family, 
and reproductive patterns between the Roma 
and non-Romani Czechs and Slovaks. 

The Parameters of Proper Parenthood and 
Sexuality 

Not all citizens were encouraged to reproduce 
"in the interest of the nation." To the contrary, 
through a suspiciously similar rhetoric, "in the 
interest of a healthy population," Romani 
women were actively discouraged from 
exercising their reproductive rights. The 
Governmental Commission for the Gypsy 
Population even recommended all National 
Committees to "apply decree No.4/1967-FO 
issued by the Ministry ofJIealth, which 
allowed an exemption [from paying for birth 
control] to those women whose use ofbirth 
control was desirable, but there was a 
possibility that its use would fail because of 
monetary issues" (Fond Poverenictva SNR 
1968). Romani fertility was under a constant 
attack all throughout the communist period, 
but the general focus on the "main problems" 
of the Roma shifted substantially over time. 
While immediately after the war it was the 

83 



,... 

-


"foreign invasion of gypsies" that troubled the 
country, in the 1950s society made its 
reluctant peace with the fact that the Roma 
were a part of the society to stay (Haisman 
1999). However, at that time the main 
problem was considered their "nomadic 
lifestyle" that was in need of violent 
suppression (Davidova 1995, Barany 2002).8 
In the 1960s and 1970s the focus of the 
"Gypsy question" gradually shifted to 
considerations of parenthood and sexuality, 
and with it the Romani "excessive" fertility 
rate. 

The actual fertility rates vary considerably 
from source to source. For example, some 
demographic statistics show an 11.1 percent 
increase in Romani population for 1968 (Srb a 
Vomackova 1968:193). Ulc claims that 
"between 1972 and 1981, the population 
[meaning the Czechoslovak population in 
general] rose by 10.5 percent, while that of 
the Gypsies increased by 23.8 percent" (Ulc 
1988:317). Mazalova's sources indicate that 
by 1990, "the average number of children of 
Czechoslovak citizens was 2.07 and of the 
Roma 3.5" (Mazalova 1997:40). Given the 
arbitrariness of the demographic methods by 
which the Roma were counted, there is no 
way to find the "correct" or "real" statistics. 
Moreover, given the radically different 
concept of "family" in Romani culture, with 
extended kin living together, it would not be 
utterly surprising if some censuses would 
have counted the same children several times. 

Despite the general alann over the decreasing 
birthrate in Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s 
and throughout the 1970s, the expert 

8 The solution to this "problem" came in the fonn of the 
1958 Anti-Nomadic Law (Zakon c. 7411958 Sb., "0 
In'a/em usidleni kocujicic11 osob "; November 11, 1958, 
(:;tava CSSR), which forcefully settled down all Roma 
in Czechoslovakia, regardless of their preferred lifestyle. 
\loreover, a related decree to this law introduced a five­
percent dispersal quota, which mandated that no given 
community can contain more than five percent of 
Romani residents. The ensuing insensitive break-up of 
many extended Romani families and their traumatic 
experiences from this period further facilitated hostility 
and misunderstanding between the Romani and non­
Romani populations. 

community expressed its discomfort with the 
fact that the Roma did not fit into this 
reproductive pattern (Heitlinger 1987: 139). 
While not being synonymous, the overall 
family values of Czechs and Slovaks 
generally coincided and thus the non­
universality of cultural values was not called 
into question. For example, statistical data 
from the late 1970s indicated important 
differences between the desired fertility of 
Czech and Slovak women. "Virtually no 
Slovak woman desires to be childless," 
claimed a 1979 sociological study, "and more 
than one third wishes to have three children." 
Among Czech women, almost twice as many 
as their Slovak counterparts wanted only one 
child. The Slovak sociologist Maria 
Schvarcova, who conducted the study, 
enthusiastically recommended the Slovak 
model as the ideal family size for the entire 
country "which would be sufficient to solve 
the Czechoslovak population problem" 
(Schvarcova 1979).9 In other words, she 
suggested that one should have many 
children, but not too many. Moreover, since 
the "Czechoslovak population problem" was 
identified as the low birthrate of the non­
Romani Czechoslovak population, it was 
implicit that "Gypsies" were not considered 
an equal component of Czechoslovak 
citizenry. Clearly, models of "ideal" family 
and parenthood patterns were not universally 
shared among Czechs and Slovaks, calling 
into question studies like Schvarcova's that 
claimed to represent "the" Czech and "the" 
Slovak culture as stable and fixed entities. 
Nonetheless, the same "natural" confonnity 
was asked from the Roma and their 
unwillingness to comply with these nonns 
was seen as a sign of social deviance. 

9 Since Schvarcova's study speaks strictly in Czecho­
Slovak dichotomy, it would be interesting to know 
whether, by Czech and Slovak women, she means 
women living in each respective republic, or women 
whom she considered to be ethnically Czech and Slovak, 
and whether she included Roma women in her study as 
well. It cannot be completely ruled out, but given the 
ethnic rhetoric at the time that clearly separated Roma 
women from "Czechoslovak" women, it is unlikely that 
Schvarcova steered away from the common pattern. 

84 



= 

II 


• Moreover, Romani fertility was rarely Burleigh and Wippermann 1991; Lewy 2000; 

• 
mentioned outside of the context ofRomani Friedlander 1995; Zimmermatm 1989).10 
"bad" and incompetent parenting. While the 

Without acknowledging the discriminatory 
Roma themselves considered their family 

• 
dimension of apartment-distribution practices 

values to be strict and loving, in popular 
and coercive settlement of Romani families 

discourse the images of "Gypsy parents" were 
into small apartments that effectively 

transformed and stereotyped into those of 
encouraged the Roma to have fewer children 

• 
negligent and violent drunks and careless and live in single-generational households 
prostitutes. For example, a widely read 

without extensive relatives, the media were 
educational weekly, UCitelske noviny, 

appalled by the housing conditions of the 

• 
reported quite regularly on the problem of 

Roma, which, according to them, were 
"Gypsy parenthood", observing that Gypsy "hardly conducive to the preservation of
"paternal authority is very loose" and 

sexual taboos" (Vlasta 1119, 1970). And while 
exclaiming on the behalf ofthe entire society 

• 
"in the interest of the future citizens" Romani 

that "[it] is concerned with the lack of 
children were forcefully removed from their 

[Romani] parental love" (Ucitelske noviny parents and placed into foster-care institutions 
8/24, 1967). "Gypsy parenting" was criticized 

• 
to ensure their "proper" upbringing (Stewart 

also from the perspective of substance abuse; 1997:123) the general view of the rest of the
as, for example, one article stated that "it is 

population of this practice seemed to be that 
not uncommon for [Romani] eight-year-olds 

"[Romani] mothers are all too eager to turn
to smoke and drink alcohol," but what was 

their offspring to the care of the state" 
even worse, they did so "in the presence of 

(UCitelske noviny 1112,1969). The chief 
their parents" (Svobodne slovo 10120, 1971). 

public health officer of the Czech Socialist 
Even Miroslav Dedic, regarded by many Republic complained in a 1970 report that 
Roma as one of the most sympathetic "education leading to planned parenthood is 
educators, argued that still not successful among the Gypsy 

population" and demanded that it be in their family, gypsy children witness 
"impressed upon Gypsy families that they mostly negative phenomena, such as 
should have only as many children as they can smoking and drinking of alcohol. The 
properly take care of' (Zpniva vladni komise 

child listens to improper conversations 
pro otazky cikanske populace 1970). 

•• 
and is a witness to unfit scenes from 
the adult life. In average gypsy family In a 1975 study about current problems in 
a warm feeling and word are rather education, social scientists argued that "the 
exceptions. The preschool must explosion ofthe Gypsy population brings with 
suppress and uproot these it a whole number of negative consequences 
inappropriate and premature [which] manifest themselves in the decreasing 

• 
children's experiences and replace quality of the Gypsy population itself, as well 
them with positive ones . . . (Dedic as the population in general, and also in the 
1982:36). decreasing social, economic, and cultural 

level of Gypsy families" (Smrcka 1974, 
Moreover, as Heitlinger, argues, seeking 

medical care during pregnancy became such a 

common norm among non-Romani women 
 10 Tracy Smith, for example, argues that besides Romani 

II that the non-attendance of Romani women at cultural values and their traditional mistrust toward Gaje 
prenatal clinics, stemming from their mistrust (non-Romani) medicine, the traumatic experience of the 

genocidal practices of the Holocaust (when along with of non-Romani services, was viewed as 
the mentally and physically handicapped the Roma were 

II synonymous with deviance, indicating an a prime target of Nazi sterilization practices and medical 
inherent negative predisposition towards the tests), which have survived in and have formed the 
child (Heitlinger 1987:179; Smith 1997; Romani collective consciousness, is a major factor 

behind Romani women's apprehension toward hospital 

II care. 

II 85 

http:1989).10


Vyborny 1958, Syfist'ova 1972, Podmele, 
1971 a 1972). Still in 1988, physician Komel 
Danas arl:,'Ued that "in gypsy families in 
Slovakia there is a rapidly l:,'Towing rate of 
mentally retarded children," which he 
"proved" by pointing to statistics that claimed 
that ninety percent of all Roma children 
attended special schools. "And it is terrible," 
he concluded, "because the mentally retarded 
grow up and then become fertile l:,'Tound 
(podhoubi) for delinquency" (Danas 8/5 
1988). 

While discussing the "problems of difficult­
to-raise gypsy children," and arguing for a 
stricter approach to Romani families, Slovak 
sociologist Frantisek Olejar refered to Soviet 
scholar Anna Solojevova's observation that 
"incorrigible children come from bad 
families" who cannot, "due to their number of 
children and/or lack of competence and 
interest, take adequate care of their offspring." 
She offered the following conclusion, praised 
by Olejar as a great model to confront the 
problems of Romani parenting in 
Czechoslovakia: 

We all have to take care of the evil 
(zlo) in the family. Not only teachers, 
who already have their heads full of 
problems, but the state, all our 
organizations. It is inevitable to start 
with the families, not with the 
children. (Olejar 1972:21) 

In short, not only Romani reproduction but 
the Romani family as an institution were seen 
as damaging to the socialist enterprise, 
harmful to the assimilation process, and 
detrimental to the Roma themselves. As 
presented by this respected author, the Roma 
were seen as the locus of evil of future 
generations, and the society as a whole was 
asked to participate in the civilizational 
process of eradicating this menace through 
greater surveillance of Roma's private lives 
and choices, and subsequent streamlining of 
these with the "normal" values of socialist 
society. 

II. Reading Between the Lines: Scientific 
Categories of the "Gypsy Question" 

Among other protective rules, the 1972 
Sterilization Law specifically stated that 
women could not be sterilized without their 
explicit written consent and a full medical 
examination prior to the procedure (Vestnik 
MZ CR 1972). However, these regulations did 
not stop some doctors from by-passing the 
requirement of patients' personal consent in 
the interest of, what they believed, was 
"general" health. Discussing her experience 
with the procedure in an interview twenty 
years later, Ida Horvathova recalled that she 
saw the doctor write into a form that she was 
"of Gypsy origin" and that she had "many 
children." Barbora Boganova said she first 
signed "something" only moments before 
going under the anesthesia. And Regina 
Miiackova disclosed that she was threatened 
by her social worker that if she did not 
undergo sterilization all her children would be 
sent to a foster-care institution (Mazalova 
1997: 39). The etlmic dimension, though not 
perceived as such, is the most startling aspect 
of the local deliberate adjustments of the 
required procedure. Despite the ethnic 
neutrality ofthe Sterilization Law itself, it 
was unequivocally Romani women who were 
identified by regional practitioners as the 
threat to the "healthy population." 

The text of the Sterilization Law at least 
partially explains why it was possible for local 
doctors and social workers to view the issue 
strictly as a medical one. The law includes a 
"List of Medical Indications" that an applicant 
had to qualify for in order to be l:,'Tanted 
permission to undergo the procedure. 
Categories such as "psychopathy with asocial 
behavior and recurrent criminality;" "severe 
sexual deviations;" "idiocy and imbecility;" 
"chronic alcoholism;" "a specific parental pair 
already having a genetically defective child," 
etc ... all address legitimate medical 
conditions. Even a condition stipulating, for 
example, that a woman is eligible for 
sterilization if she is "medically fit and did not 
give birth to a genetically defective child yet, 
if expert tests show that she is most likely 
predisposed to give birth to a genetically 
defective child in the future," cannot be 
attacked on medical grounds. However, the 

86 



•
•
•
•
• 


ultimate power to precisely define the 
behavior and condition corresponding to these 
categories as well as to diagnose a patient 
with a particular condition or provide the 
"expert tests," rested in the hands of local 
medical and social practitioners (Vestnik MZ 
SSR 1972). 

Moreover, the casual wording of several 
suspicious categories, such as "unfit 
parenthood" and "multiple children" points to 
the apparent confusion over the distinctions 
between medical and social discourses in 
communist Czechoslovakia. Clearly, social 
workers did not often need to labor too hard to 
find the appropriate column to check to satisfy 
the bureaucratic illusion of competent social 
health practices. As, for example, Ursula 
Heckova revealed: "After my mother's death, 
my father remarried a Czech woman who had 
five children, like me. When she saw that I 
got 4,000 [crowns] for sterilization, she went 
too. But she didn't get a dime" (Pellar and 
Andrs 1990). Her testimony implies that the 
application of designed categories and 
indications for sterilization were left at the 
discretion of the local staff to determine who 
qualified as having "many children" and who 
did not. While these categories seemed to 
address social and medical differences, they 
were inseparable from ethnic associations. 
The crucial question then is what prompted 
and enabled the doctors and social workers to 
make the conceptual leap to use the ethnicity­
neutral protective law as an ethnically 
inscribed punitive law? Or to put the question 
differently, why was "Gypsy" almost 
universally translated as "unhealthy" in 
Czechoslovak social speech? 

In 1972, the same year the Sterilization Law 
was issued, the Ministry of Labor and Social 
Work issued a "methodical handbook for 
National Committee social workers" entitled 
"Care for the Socially Unadjusted 
(nepfizpusobemf:) Citizens" (Metodicka 
prirucka MPSV 1972:1). The handbook was a 
compilation of eight theoretical and five 
empirical articles written by psychologists, 
sociologists, sexologists, criminologists, 
lawyers, and physicians, all addressing the 
problems of"socially abnonnal, pathological 

and deviant persons. -, The introduction to the 
volume asserted that the "socialist [effort] to 
prevent criminality, alcoholism, prostitution, 
sexual deviance, parasitism, and other 
negative phenomena cannot consist only of 
punitive and repressive measures." It argued 
that to date, care for "socially unadjusted 
citizens has not been a component of general 
social politics" and praised the Ministry of 
Labor and Social Work in that it "filled the 
gap [in social work] by instituting 
comprehensive care for the socially 
unadjusted citizens serviced by special social 
workers - social curators" (Metodicka 
pfirucka MPSV 1972:2). 

In the course of four hundred pages, the 
articles thoroughly define and explain the 
"unadjustable" (nepfizpusohitelne) citizens, 
the underlying causes of their non­
adaptability, their behavior, the circumstances 
in which they live, and the consequences of 
their presence for the entire society. The 
handbook states that there is an "acute 
interrelationship among the diverse 
pathological phenomena, such as criminality­
alcohol, criminality-parasitism, parasitism­
alcohol, alcohol-prostitution, prostitution­
parasitism, and so on" and points out that the 
most important "common denominator of 
such diverse phenomena of social pathology 
is precisely their negative social evaluation 
and their undesirability." According to these 
studies, "the subjects of these negative 
phenomena usually constitute a rather small 
body of deviant, socially not-adapted, 
persons, problem families, and conflict 
groups" (Metodicka pfirucka MPSV 1972:4­
5). 

The study further argues that the reason why 
"such phenomena still exist in socialist 
society, which has succeeded in eradicating 
material inequalities," is that they are the 
"residue of the previous capitalist regime." 
Allegedly, "pathological conditions," and 
such behavior, travel from generation to 
generation: 

An individual usually prefers the 
subculture, nonns and values that are 
closest to him. If a child is raised in a 

II 87 



pathological subculture, which is in 
contradiction with the prevailing 
culture, he [or she] will become 
delinquent in a similar process in 
which an Eskimo becomes an Eskimo. 
(Metodicka pnrucka MPSV 1972:9) 

The handbook explains that if "deviant 
behavior is passed within problem families 
from generation to generation," it then 
becomes a "social inheritance" that is hard to 
eradicate from the society (Metodicka 
pnrucka MPSV 1972:11). While 
Czechoslovak society is considered more 
advanced in fighting pathology than other 
countries, because the "Czechoslovak 
population is homogenous, socially only 
mildly stratified, sharing the same culture, 
which varies only in few insignificant 
details," it still has to "firmly battle social 
deviancy" (Metodicka pi'irucka MPSV 
1972: 19). The book explains to the social 
curators that 

most carriers of socially pathological 
phenomena come from seriously 
deficient families. Many criminals, 
recidivists, alcoholics, prostitutes, 
citizens avoiding work and other not­
adjusted citizens grew up in 
conditions of broken families, families 
of alcoholics and otherwise not­
adjusted persons, as well as from 
families with substandard cultural 
levels. (Metodicka pnrucka MPSV 
1972:26) 

After the introduction, the handbook discusses 
various definitions, diagnoses of diseases, and 
pathological conditions, often making 
recourses to theories of psychology, 
pathological psychology, toxicology, and 
criminal justice. Not a single time is there a 
mention of "Gypsies" anywhere in the four­
hundred-page long text. Should there be since 
it was not about the Roma, but about "general 
delinquency and patholoh'Y"? Or was it about 
"Gypsies" after all? The rhetoric of this 
document is a typical example of an 
obfuscated language that can be understood, 
interpreted, and implemented in a variety of 
ways. The comparison of definitions and 

tellls used in this handbook and definitions 
and terms used by various physicians, social 
workers and state administrators to address 
the "Gypsy question" in a plethora of other 
contexts reveals that they are strikingly 
similar and often indistinguishable. Indeed, 
the terminology used in the Sterilization 
Decree is in many cases identical. 

The scientific medical and social discourse 
was so profusely intertwined with rhetoric 
used in describing the "actual" problems and 
conditions of the Roma that the interpretation 
of these theories and their subsequent 
translation to practice was left completely 
open. Since the book makes a specific claim 
to present "general infolllational material 
about the fundamental problems of 
socialization and social non-adaptability 
designed especially for orientation of social 
workers and curators," whose work 
description often dealt with "citizens of gypsy 
origin," the question about the 
interchangeability and translatability of these 
terms in various contexts is crucial to 
understanding the ways in which 
discrimination of the Roma functioned in the 
Czechoslovak welfare system (Metodicka 
pnrucka MPSV 1972:27). 

Indeed, very different standards were evoked 
when discussing sexuality and reproduction of 
the Roma on the one hand and of Czechs and 
Slovaks on the other. Demographers in the 
early 1970s even pointed to "an unnatural sex­
ratio among Gypsies," which might result in 
problematic sexuality of the Roma in general 
(Srb 1971) .11 "Gypsy" reproduction and 
sexuality were defined explicitly in terms of 
primitiveness, unhealthiness, and ignorance, 
while "Czechoslovak" sexuality was defined 
in terms of civilization, health, rationality, and 
progress. For example, one weekly exclaimed 
that "unabashed promiscuity among [gypsy] 

II TIle "natural" ratio was that of non-Roma 
Czechoslovak population, which consisted of 51.2% 
women, while the Roma had "only" 49.96% women. 
Srb also hinted that "lately there are many mixed 
maniages ... and a substantial part of the Gypsy female 
population thus disappears from the Gypsy population," 
demonstrating once again the arbitrariness of the 
definition of a "Gypsy." 

88 



II 

II 
teenagers and condoned prostitution of gypsy 
girls with whites are also a norm", while 

II expressing distaste over the "fact" that" 13­
year-old [gypsies] have more than a 


• 
 theoretical know ledge of procreative acts" 

(UCitelske noviny 1115,1972). 

• 
But it was not only the alleged young age of 

• 
first sexual encounters of the Roma that 
consternated the "Czechoslovak" society. The 
most appalling and alarming to proper Czech 
and Slovak citizens seemed to be the notion of 
"gypsy inbreeding," which was immediately 
linked to the vision of an increasing mental 

•• 
debility of the society. Even the usually sober 
and pro-Romani weekly Literarni noviny, 
reported that the practice of inbreeding among 
the Roma leads to "crowds of thousands who 
are illiterate ...crowds of inferior individuals, 
parasites and thieves, prostitutes and children 
running around naked ..." (Literarni noviny 
3/5, 1966). II This juxtaposition combated the "Gypsy 
question" on two fronts: First, it allowed the 
society to measure the Roma against the II 	 Czechs and Slovaks in categories that were 
defined by Czech and Slovak cultural models, 
with Czech and proper functioning as II synonyms. Second, relegating the difference 
between Czechs and Slovaks on the one hand 
and the Roma on the other hand into the realm 
of sexuality and reproduction equipped the 
society to articulate its concerns about Roma 
ethnicity without actually referring to 

II ethnicity, and thus without the concern of 

•
• 

being accused of racism. It is not difficult to 
read between the lines of the decrees in order 
to see what interpretations were possible 
when a suggestive wording met with implicit 
attitudes toward the Roma smoldering in 

• 
popular consciousness. Since the Roma were 
(in official reports, popular jokes, and media 
images) routinely associated with mentally 
and socially deviant behavior, even though in 
theory these categories were free of any 
mention of ethnic or cultural difference, they 
were flexible enough to hide social and ethnic 

II 	 concerns under a veil of medical science. 

• 

In fact, the 1977 Health Report of the Slovak 
government explicitly urged local 
establishments to make use of such an option: 

The unhealthy popUlation of gypsy 
children is not adequately monitored 
by the appropriate sectors of Regional 
Municipal Committees (ONV) or by 
the Ministry of Health of the SSR and 
that is the reason why there is no 
effort being made to find new ways to 
suppress further unhealthy 
populations in these families. Not 
even health indications. which could 
be used as justification for 
sterilization, are being used. 
(Sekretariat Komisie vl<ldy SSR 
1977:5) 

The following example reveals how short the 
distance between official rhetoric and practice 
on local levels actually was. The Secretary of 
the Municipal Committee in Jarovnice, a town 
in Eastern Slovakia where, between 1971 and 
1989, 127 Gypsy women out of2024 were 
sterilized, complained about the mental 
retardation of parents and the debility or 
imbecility (oligophreny) of their children. 
According to her, the "obvious retardation 
does not have to be measured by any special 
tests," but is "readily apparent to anybody 
who sees the way the Gypsies live," as well as 
by the fact that the "children are unable to 
succeed in regular elementary school." The 
chairman of the town argued that "Gypsy 
women should be sterilized after the second 
child, without regard to age." The town 
council also recOlmnended gynecological 
check-ups of "retarded" Romani girls from 
fourteen years of age. "Women who give birth 
to several mentally retarded or otherwise 
damaged children should be compulsorily 
sterilized, regardless of age" (KomanickY 
1990: 1-2, Andrs a Pellar 1990). Neither the 
town's representatives nor the medical 
establishment of the town even attempted to 
deny the history of the sterilization practice. 
They believed they did a good deed for the 
future of their nation. They did not seem to 
question the legitimacy of their standards of 
"mental retardation" as a license to sterilize 
the Roma. The question that remains is where 

89 II 



one should look for the line between "good 
intentions in the interest of a healthy 
population" and scientific racism. These 
sentiments blatantly demonstrate how deeply 
racism was ingrained in the social fabric of 
Czechoslovak society during the communist 
regime and how easily it got disseminated as a 
scientific discourse. 

"Enlightened Racism" in the Scientific 
Discourse 

It is impossible to investigate or find a 
"correct route" of the travel of racially 
charged sentiments between institutional 
orders and popular consciousness, most of 
which did not use any predictable or 
recognizable racist rhetoric and instead were 
ciphered in the rhetoric of social pathology 
and backwardness. One of the most 
astonishing things about the Sterilization 
Decree and related regulations is how 
extremely vague and ambiguous they were. 
And yet, there seemed to be a latent, 
unspoken consensus by local doctors and 
petty social workers all across the country to 
decode the ambiguity of the documents in 
similar ways. The anti-Romani sentiments, 
present in both popular and scientific 
literature, partially explain why many 
Czechoslovak doctors did not see ethical 
problems with executing sterilization 
procedures on Romani women. To the 
contrary, these professionals often took the 
cause up as their own, seeing themselves as 
saviors of the nation. A gynecologist from 
Slovakia explained: "Here [in Slovakia] they 
multiply like rabbits," adding that when he 
performed cesarean sections on Romani 
women, he automatically tied their tubes 
(Helsinki Human Rights Watch 1992:23). 
Similarly, a pediatrician from Northern 
Bohemia reasoned: "When you see how these 
Gypsies multiply and you see that it is a 
population of an inferior quality, and when 
you look at the huge sums that ha[ ve] to be 
paid for the care of these children, it [the 
sterilization] is understandable" (Helsinki 
Human Rights Watch 1992:31). 

In 1975, Dr. lin Vacek, a chief gynecologist 
at a hospital in Usti nad Orlici, sterilized 29 

Romani women for "socio-economic 
reasons." He published the results of this 
practice in a professional medical journal 
Ceskoslovenska gynekologie, where he 
emphasized the financial advantages of 
sterilization over governmental spending on 
the institutional upbringing of Romani 
children. The compensation of 38,800 crowns 
that the women were paid for the 
sterilizationl2 was "absolutely insignificant in 
comparison to the price of 250,000 crowns the 
state would have to pay for one asylum child, 
often genetically damaged," Vacek explains, 
implicitly assuming most Roma children 
simply would be born mentally retarded and 
inevitably end up in a foster-care institution. 
"Evidently, from those families, there were a 
ton of kids in the homes. We more or less 
knew that," he added (Vacek 1976:622). 

Once Romani women were identified as 
eligible and desirable for sterilization, all that 
was needed for the legality of the procedure 
was their consent. Libuse Balazova wrote in 
her application as a reason for sterilization 
"problems with varicose veins;" before the 
surgery nobody checked if it was true. Other 
women either did not know what they signed 
or were threatened by their social workers. 
Only Eva Lilova did not try to camouflage her 
true reason for undergoing the procedure. 
Without hiding behind a medical condition, 
she blatantly wrote in: "money." Nobody 
found that alarming or suspicious. Even so, 
just before surgery she ran away with her 
sister, who was only eighteen at the time. The 
next day, the social worker brought both of 
them back and, as a punishment, deducted 
2,000 crowns from the promised 10,000 
(Mazalova 1997:37). 

One wonders what ever happened to the 1972 
Sterilization Decree that was allegedly 
designed to increase the protection of 
applicants' rights. In Slovakia, the "rigor" of 
the decree even prompted the Governmental 
Bureau for the Questions of the Gypsy 
Population to complain about it as too limiting 

12 This figure came to 1,338 crowns per person, which 
equaled a little ovcr one-third of an average monthly 
salary. 

90 



••••••••••••••••••• 

for their effort to protect the "healthy 
population": 

Even such parents [meaning mentally 
retarded ones] cannot be sterilized 
without their consent. The only legal 
way to circumvent this problem right 
now, allowed by §10 of the Civil 
Code, is to constitute such a citizen 
legally incapacitated and [ officially] 
assibTfl her a social guardian. 
(Sekretariat Komisie vlady SSR 
1977:6)13 

Such circumvention, however, provided 
enough space for Dr. Vacek. He willingly 
explained the "simplification" of the consent 
procedures in his hospital and district. 
Executing the procedure according to the 
decree was "for these women, perpetually 
with low IQ, impossible," he explains. That 
was why he created a special form, where the 
application was filled in by a social worker 
from the regional welfare office instead of by 
the woman herself. Vacek boasts that his form 
served as an example for the entire region 
(Vacek 1976:625). Significantly, this process 
made Romani women not only sterile, but 
also mute. 

Like other doctors and social workers, Vacek, 
too, felt that he understood enough about the 
inherent inferiority of the Roma to take the 
decision into his own hands. He is still proud 
ofhis method of sterilizing within 48 hours of 
giving a birth. "Otherwise, nobody would be 
able to chase those women back to the 
hospital," he argues. "Before a woman would 

13 § 7 (CSR) and § 10 (SSR) of the 1972 Sterilization 
Decree state that: 

Applications for sterilization submittcd by 
minors and persons with limited mental 
capacity have to be accompanied by a consent 
of their lcgal guardian (i.e. a state-assigned 
social worker.) For a person who is/idly 
legally incapacitated, the entire application is 
submitted by the legal guardian. In cases when 
sterilization should be carried out because of 
mental disea~e, but the person in question is 
not fully legally incapacitated, the law requires 
a consent of a guardian assigned for this 
specific reason by a court, according to § 29 of 
the Civil Code. (p.2, emphasis mine) 

sweat out an application, she would be 
pregnant again," he nonchalantly remarked, 
justifying his simplification of the procedures 
by sterilizing Romani women with forced or 
ill-informed consent (Mazalova 1997:40). 
Efficiency, traditionally used as a unit of 
measurement, was in the hands of doctors like 
Vacek, "magically" transformed into a 
powerful instrument of control. For doctors 
like Vacek, the issue of sterilization was a 
strictly medical issue, free of any ethnic 
dimension. The association of the Roma with 
social and mental deviance became so 
ingrained in official reports and popular 
consciousness that even today, more than ten 
years after the collapse of the communist 
regime (not to mention during the 1970s and 
1980s) the allegation itself, that these 
procedures might have had racist undertones, 
seems absurd to many. "We did not force 
anybody ... we did it decently," insists Vacek 
indignantly (Mazalova 1997:40). 

III. The Gendered Nature of Romani 
Sterilization 

Romani men are simply missing from the 
story as told by the documents. They have no 
voices. They have no bodies. They are not 
subj ected to the pressure to get sterilized "in 
the interest of the health ofthe population." 
They are not being visited by social workers 
and offered thousands of crowns "in order to 
help to overcome the adverse living 
conditions of their families." They are not 
consulted as husbands, lovers, or fathers. 
None of the studies, investigations, statistics, 
or doctors mentioned in the literature is 
concerned with either men's voices in the 
story or with men as objects of sterilization 
procedures. And yet, their absence is 
significant as well, inviting a new set of 
questions, concerns, and sites for historical 
analysis and interpretation (Roberts 1999).14 

14 The history of sterilization procedures in thc United 
States, enacted mainly against the African American and 
Latino populations, reveals a similarly gendered story. 
On the other hand, in India, for example, during the rule 
of Indira Gandhi, it was primarily men who were 
targeted and sterilized by the regime. 

91 

http:1999).14


-----

Dr. Vacek has already foreshadowed one 
aspect of the sex-specific sterilization policy: 
convenience. Romani women were simply 
already there, in the medical establishments, 
giving births, getting abortions. Many of them 
got sterilized without their knowledge, while 
undergoing a different medical procedure. A 
Romani woman from Slovakia disclosed that 
she 

went to get an abortion, and they told 
me, 'Be so kind as to sign here before 
you go in for the abortion.' So I 
signed and went in for the abortion. 
They just gave me the paper to sign, 
folded it, and put it into an envelope. I 
didn't know anything. After the 
procedure, they told me that 
something went wrong, that they had 
to repeat the procedure. I was afraid 
that part of the fetus would stay in me, 
so they gave me an injection and 
brought me upstairs to the operating 
room. After the operation, when I 
went downstairs ... [the other women] 
told me that I had been sterilized .... I 
was shocked. ... Now I have a new 
boyfriend and we want to get married, 
but I'm shocked because I can't give 
him any children. (Helsinki Human 
Rights Watch 1992:23) 

The bodies of Romani women were already 
physically present in the medical 
establishments. Even if it might have been 
more medically and economically "efficient" 
and less painful to sterilize men (Puchala 
1989),15 it seems that socially and politically it 
was much more convenient to sterilize 
women. In modem societies, hospitals have 
been recognized as means of tremendous 
social control, and the situation in the 
communist societies was not different in this 
respect. 

Women's bodies became the canvas on which 
to paint social deviance. In 1989, Drs. Posluch 

15 Puchala argues that male vasectomy is faster, more 
economic, and has fewer medical repercussions for the 
male body than ovarian sterilization has for the female 
body. 

and Posluchova published an academic article 
in which they arl::,rued, based on "legitimate, 
scientific" studies, that 

the rel::,rulation of their [Gypsy] 
reproduction is necessary even in our 
advanced society, because it concerns 
citizens who have overwhelmingly 
negative attitudes toward work ethics 
and education. They have a high level 
of criminality, alcoholism and women 
have a tendency toward promiscuity. 
Significant is also their cultural and 
social retardation behind the rest of 
the population. All this leads to the 
fact that their sexual hie starts very 
early. Young gypsy girls give birth 
without biological and social 
readiness for maternity. Another 
negative aspect is their high fertility, 
... but many gypsy women don't want 
to use birth control. (Posluchova and 
Posluch 1989:220-223) 

These authors define sexuality and 
reproduction solely as a female problem. 
While their (meaning all Roma's) sexual life 
allegedly starts earlier, it is the woman on 
whose body this concern is being played out. 
Of course, the authors claim to be concerned 
with health, hygiene, and social education 
when they call for "planned parenthood" 
among the Roma. Vacek, too, states that "we 
particularly place great hopes on expanding 
the number of sterilizations.... Into the future, 
we expect this form of regulation to increase 
especially among younger women with fewer 
children" (Vacek 1976:625). While one could 
argue that such statements constitute a 
"propagation of genocide" and thus could be 
prosecuted even retroactively under the §259 
of the current Czech Penal Code, these 
professionals were convinced that sterilization 
was a social and medical, and not an ethnic, 
issue (Trestni provo CR 1995). High Romani 
fertility was, according to these authors, the 
result of the sexual deviance of Romani 
women. Thus if one wanted to control 
Romani reproduction, one had to control the 
female body. 

92 

7 



Active sexual behavior in communist 
Czechoslovakia was confined to the realm of 
heterosexual marriage. Even a woman who 
deliberately and independently decided to be a 
single mother officially carried an 
"illegitimate child" (Heitlinger 1987:243). 
Proper womanhood was defined by woman's 
reproductive ability and her motherhood. 
However, while a proper woman could not 
have been defined without being associated 
with a man, a sexually deviant woman was 
vested with agency of her own. Not only was 
the concept of monogamy among Romani 
couples implicitly called into question when 
evoking promiscuity and prostitution of 
Romani women, female sexual deviance 
clearly could not have been solved through 
male sterilization. Moreover, because of the 
traditional cultural bond between masculinity, 
sexuality, and natural parenthood in 
Czechoslovakia, the interference with men's 
ability to naturally procreate would have 
resulted in their public emasculation, and 
hence in a threat to the patriarchal order of the 
society as a whole. 

While the Romani woman was singled out 
and overwhelmingly blamed for the high 
Romani fertility rate and her body was 
targeted as the key to "Gypsy planned 
parenthood," the number of children in the 
family was often a logical result of existing 
gender power relations rather than a 
consequence of ignorance, irrationality, or 
irresponsibility. In Romani culture, as in most 
East European societies in general, traditional 
patriarchal gender norms were the prevailing 
pattern of family and sexual life (Heitlinger 
1987:243). Women were still in subordinate 
positions in the relationship: the man "took 
care of the sexual act" and the woman was 
expected to bear the consequences of his 
irresponsibility or failure in case of pregnancy 
(Morokvasic 1981: 139). Thus, ironically, by 
becoming pregnant, the Romani woman was 
seen as the locus of the "fertility problem," 
which in turn could be addressed only through 
the control and regulation of her body. "It is 
important to teach gypsy women to ... better 
plan their population," claimed a member of a 

Regional Commission for the Questions of the 
Gypsy Population in 1970 (Kier 1970:215). 

The Ministry of Health proclaimed its 
immense attention to the "care for gypsy 
woman, mother and child" and reported that it 
succeeded in getting gypsy women to give 
birth in institutions "even though many agreed 
only under the threat of their child support 
money being withdrawn." However, such a 
logic and argumentation made it also 
potentially easy for Romani men not to fully 
comprehend the discriminatory nature of these 
measures and instead to perceive a potential 
loss of financial child support as the woman's 
fault and blame her for it, opening the door to 
domestic violence or other subordination and 
abuse. The Ministry also complained that 
"gypsy women refused to take birth control 
and only in exceptional cases [ doctors] 
succeeded in implanting intrauterine birth 
control" (Fond Poverenictva SNR 1968). 
While it was quite difficult for non-Romani 
Czechoslovak women to obtain birth control 
unless they were married, already had 
children, and the health practitioners decided 
it was "good for them," (Heitlinger 
1979: 186), the Commission for Gypsy 
Population has recommended since 1967 to 
all National Councils that their social and 
health care workers should "guarantee the 
widespread extension of birth control use 
among gypsy women by any means of urging 
and health education" (Fond Poverenictva 
SNR 1968). Since many Romani women 
refused birth control based on their cultural 
beliefs and values (which nobody cared 
about), often the only perceived means of 
"urging" and "educating" left to the social and 
health care workers was women's 
sterilization. 

Many articles and studies concerned with the 
Romani sterilization indicate that many 
Romani women underwent sterilization 
voluntarily, attracted to the high financial 
incentives connected to the procedure (Pellar 
and Andrs 1990). The question is, of course, 
whether consent based on financial incentives 
offered to a person belonging to the 
economically weakest segment of the 
population and living in substandard social 

93 



conditions can be considered truly voluntary. 
Applying the concept of free choice and 
agency in this particular way comes close to 
blaming the victims themselves. However, 
surprisingly, none of these articles or studies 
attempts to investigate the potential of the 
reversal of these policies to empower or even 
protect Romani women. 

Czech psychiatrist Radkin HOllZak argues that 
while "some psychiatrists consider a woman 
after a uterus removal to be healthy, as a 
psychiatrist I do not consider this a healthy 
condition. In a psychological self-evaluation, 
a woman after sterilization is different than 
before" (Stepan 1989:42). While such 
essentialist interpretations of gender might 
generally coincide with traditional Romani 
perception of a woman that is based on 
assumptions of female fertility as the 
necessary precondition for "nonnal" 
womanhood, not all Romani women felt 
bound by that tradition. Some of them 
preferred having control over their own 
bodies, sexuality, and reproduction to 
considerations ofproper womanhood, whether 
prescribed by medical authorities or cultural 
values (Strathern 1988).16 

Being often squeezed between economic 
difficulties and gender subordination, 
undergoing sterilization might have been, for 
at least some of them, one of the few ways 
available of exercising control over their 
bodies and lives. Margita Lakotova, for 
example, confided that despite her husband's 
disapproval, she decided to undergo 
sterilization because "[she] couldn't defend 
herself against him." She complains that "he 
just doesn't care [if we have more children] 
but it's impossible, we can't feed them. We 
already have three.,,17 These experiences 

16 Strathern warns against assumptions that women 
everywhere are the same, that women's speech reveals 
"a woman's point ofvicw," and that women always 
speak from the gendcr idcntity of "woman." She urgcs 
the neccssity of investigating the forms of power and 
discourse that constitute the frames and contexts in 
which women enact their choices. 

17 Oral intcrviews with Margita Lakotova, Prague, 
August 13, 16, and 24, 1997 (Tape-rccorded in the 
personal archive of the author). 

challenge the interpretation that Romani 
women have been only silent victims of 
sterilization practices. This fact does not 
negate the violation of the many Romani 
women who did not have any control over 
their bodies or were misinfonned about the 
procedure. But it suggests that the Romani 
women who have been sterilized (and who 
constitute the existing statistics), especially 
those who underwent the procedure in the late 
1980s and early 1990s, most likely do not all 
belong demographically to the same segment 
of the population and their experiences cannot 
be universalized. Moreover, it points to 
Romani women's ability to transfonn the 
practices meant to control them to their 
advantage and to take charge over their own 
bodies. 

Conclusion 

The circumstances surrounding the practice of 
sterilization show how important the 
regulation of sexuality was in reaffIrming 
lines of ethnic difference between the Roma 
and non-Roma in communist Czechoslovakia. 
Sterilization among Romani women was 
encouraged by local professionals because 
cultural means (i.e. education or labor ethic) 
were seen as ineffective to remedy the 
problem of "Gypsy" deviance. Social 
deviance was allegedly so ingrained in the 
"Gypsy" character that it was essential to cure 
it through biological means. It does not seem 
an accident that Roma's alleged derelict 
parenting and careless reproduction were at 
the core of the concerns with the "Gypsy 
question." Before the Roma could even start 
to be civilized, they first had to catch up with 
the "Czechoslovak" model of parenthood and 
sexuality. At the same time, this tendency also 
demonstrates that nonnative sexuality, 
parenthood, and reproduction served not only 
as a way for the non-Roma to control the 
Roma, but also as a self-disciplinary tool for 
the regulation of the non-Romani 
Czechoslovak population's behavior as well. 

Since the discourse on parenthood and 
sexuality in general was essentially gendered, 
this aspect logically extended to the issue of 
sterilization. While sterilization was seen as a 

94 

http:1988).16


II 
possible solution to the "Gypsy question" as • such, in reality it was strictly a female issue. 
In order to regulate the reproduction of the 
Roma, the Czechoslovak society had to 

•• 
regulate the bodies of Romani women. This 
conceptual link resulted in a gendered notion 
of Romani deviance since Romani fertility 
became a problem of sexually irresponsible 

• 
and promiscuous Romani women and since 
other forms of social deviance, such as mental 
retardation, were born within the woman's 
body. 

• 

While those involved in the sterilization 
process did not seem to see explicit 
connection between the politics of ethnicity 
and ideology of normative sexuality and 
reproduction, this study demonstrates that 
such a connection deserves to be seriously 
considered. The latent consensus of the 
majority of petty social workers and local 
doctors to translate the ambiguity of the 
official medical language into a "discourse on 
ethnicity," suggests that, contrary to the 
official rhetoric, racism remained a salient and 
pervasive feature at the everyday social level 
of the Czechoslovak society during the 
communist regime. Clearly, the country 
practiced a double standard of citizenship 
based on ethnic grounds. The meaning of 
"Gypsiness" kept shifting to fit various 
individual and collective senses of identity, 
permeating both gender/sexual and 
raciaVethnic matrixes. Thus, it seems feasible 
to argue that the construction of ethnicity in 
communist Czechoslovakia was heavily 
informed and inextricably linked with the 
discourse on social deviance and sexuality. 

Moreover, the circumstances of the 
sterilization practice in postwar 

II Czechoslovakia show that the communist 
regime was far from exercising total control 
over all aspects of the society. In fact, this 
article demonstrated that there was no such 

II clear division between the "regime" and the 
"people." Power could be found at all levels 
of the society, as "obvious" intentions and 

II objectives of various laws and policies were 

II 
transformed and acquired radically different 
meaning in the hands of those who interpreted 
and implemented them. Official laws may be 

one, but certainly not the only, site where 
institutional power was exercised. In fact, low 
level officials constituted a very important 
"nexus" in Czechoslovakia because they were 
participants or purveyors of two different 
discourses - popular discourses about the 
Roma "from below" and official discourses 
on the "Gypsy question" "from above" - and 
they thus had the potential of inflicting double 
harm on the Roma by translating one 
discourse into the other. Policies written in the 
legal code of the regime were not the same as 
policies as they affected real people. This was 
because, even if local officials were ordered 
to follow directives from above, they still had 
the discursive freedom to interpret and apply 
laws according to the popular prejudices and 
stereotypes that inform their attitudes and 
behavior. This does not mean that local 
officials were free to do what they wanted or 
that they were not monitored by their 
superiors. Rather, it means that such officials, 
simply as interpretive beings, could have (and 
indeed did) apply policies in ways that more 
directly related to popular consciousness and 
culture than according to the ideological 
straightjacket of the letter of the law. 

Equally importantly, this article asserted that 
the story of sterilization cannot be written as a 
simple study in victimology or identity 
politics. Even though the evidence presented 
so far suggests that with more research the 
historical narrative will only become 
increasingly complex and difficult to 
untangle, the gravity of it also makes clear 
that in order to better understand the social 
mechanisms that infonned the constructions 
of ethnicity and sexuality in communist 
Czechoslovakia, such research needs to 
continue. 

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