"(Not)Getting children easily" - a glimpse into the reproductive ecologies of East-Slovakian Romani women
Abstract
The high fertility of Romani women in the Central-Eastern European socio-geographical space has by public actors been since long labelled as a problematic issue that overloads the welfare system. In Slovakia the number of Romani children born are decidedly larger than the number of non-Roma children.
In this setting Romani wombs have historically been considered as a cause for the state's concern and have been discursively been portrayed as a time bomb that is about to explode. Among the Romani group I researched fertility patterns are varied, reflective of diverse social and class-based belongings.
My interest is in identifying points of conflict: situations where divergent expectations for Romani wombs play out into wider struggles over women's ability and desire to decide about their fertility. Based on a one-year long ethnographic fieldwork in a large and extremely poor Romani settlement in East-Slovakia conducted in 2010 my paper discusses a repertoire of everyday situations in which fertility is foregrounded.
Through case studies of settlement-living Romani women the paper analyzes how women live their reproductive possibilities, presenting their choices as multi-layered phenomena reflective of various economic, political, moral and social dilemmas rather than as simple results of rationalization processes. I understand my infromants' reproductive decision-making processes as compounded by internal and external forces with their own competing agendas; correspondingly, I frame fertility patterns within the settlement as disparate and conversing with a heterogeneous logics of normativity.