Planned Parenthood Behind the Curtain: Population Policy and Sterilization of Romani Women in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1972-1989
Abstract
Given the involuntary nature of many of the procedures and their ethnic aspect, the sterilization practice carries considerable importance for exposing the ways in which discrimination against the Roma during the communist regime in Czechoslovakia was carried out. Significantly, it further illuminates a critical dimension of the transformation of the "Gpsy 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. 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 betwee