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Uzbekistan’s secret: Quota for sterilizing women
“What do you need more children for? You already have two.”
“There is a quota. My quota is four women a month.”
Evidence gathered by the BBC suggests that the Uzbek authorities have run a programme over the last two years to sterilise women across the country, often without their knowledge.
Two other medical sources suggest that there is especially strong pressure on doctors in rural areas of Uzbekistan, where some gynaecologists are expected to sterilise up to eight women per week.
“We are talking about tens of thousands of women being sterilised throughout the country,” says Sukhrob Ismailov, who runs the Expert Working Group, one of very few non-governmental organisations operating in Uzbekistan.
In 2010, the Expert Working Group conducted a seven-month-long survey of medical professionals, and gathered evidence of some 80,000 sterilisations over the period, but there is no way of verifying the number and some of the procedures were carried out with the patient’s consent.
On paper, sterilisations should be voluntary, but women don’t really get a choice.
Several doctors and medical professionals said forced sterilisation is not only a means of population control but also a bizarre short-cut to lowering maternal and infant mortality rates.
Uzbekistan ranked 140th out of 194 countries in terms of infant mortality in 2005-2010, according to data from the UN Population Division.
This put it just behind Laos, Madagascar and Bolivia, and just ahead of Bangladesh, Ghana and Papua New Guinea.
Figures from the UN Population Fund indicate that Uzbekistan had a maternal mortality ratio of 30 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2008 – a 44% improvement on 1990.
This ratio put it level with Iran, just ahead of Albania and Malaysia (31) and just behind Armenia (29), Romania and Uruguay (27).
The Uzbek government stressed that Uzbekistan’s record in protecting mothers and babies is excellent and could be considered a model for countries around the world.
However, Nigora is among many for whom forced sterilisation is a reality. She had an emergency C-section. A day later she was told she had been sterilised. On the same day, her newborn died.
Nigora is 24 and will never have children.
While sterilization is not an official law, women from different parts of the country all had the same story that was consistent with those of the doctors and medical professionals inside Uzbekistan, according to BBC.
A gynecologist from the capital, Tashkent said that she had a quota of four sterilizations to meet every month.
“Every year we are presented with a plan. Every doctor is told how many women we are expected to give contraception to; how many women are to be sterilized,” she told BBC.
A source at the Ministry of Health told BBC that the sterilization program is intended to control Uzbekistan’s growing population, which the country says is about 28 million people, but experts believe that the population may be less because many people have emigrated since the last census in 1989 when the population was around 20 million.
The first cases of forced sterilization were reported in 2005 by pathologist Gulbakhor Turaeva who worked in Andijan. She had noticed that many uteruses of young, healthy women were being brought to a mortuary where she had worked. She had gathered evidence of 200 forced sterilizations by tracking down the women from whom the uteruses had been removed, and went public. When she asked her bosses for an explanation, they fired her, and she was charged with smuggling opposition literature into the country and jailed in 2007.
While the United Nations Committee Against Torture reported that forcible sterilizations and hysterectomies in Uzbekistan appeared to drop after 2007.
Many Uzbek doctors said that in there has been a dramatic increase in Caesarean section births, which provide surgeons with an easy opportunity to sterilize the mother, and disputed government statements that only 6.8 percent of women give birth via C-sections.
“Rules on Caesareans used to be very strict, but now I believe 80% of women give birth through C-sections. This makes it very easy to perform a sterilisation and tie the fallopian tubes,” says a chief surgeon at a hospital near Tashkent.
Uzbekistan /ʊzˌbɛkɨˈstɑːn/, officially the Republic of Uzbekistan (Uzbek: O‘zbekiston Respublikasi or Ўзбекистон Республикаси) is the only doubly landlocked country in Central Asia. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south. Before 1991, it was part of the Soviet Union.
Once part of the Persian Samanid and later Timurid empires, the region was conquered in the early 16th century by Uzbek nomads, who spoke an Eastern Turkic language. Most of Uzbekistan’s population today belong to the Uzbek ethnic group and speak the Uzbek language, one of the family of Turkic languages.
Uzbekistan was incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 19th century, and in 1924 became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, known as the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (Uzbek SSR). It has been an independent republic since August 31st, 1991 (officially, from the September the 1st, 1991).
Uzbekistan’s economy relies mainly on commodity production, including cotton, gold, uranium, potassium, and natural gas. Despite the declared objective of transition to a market economy, Uzbekistan continues to maintain rigid economic controls, which often repel foreign investors. The policy of gradual, strictly controlled transition to the market economy has nevertheless produced beneficial results in the form of economic recovery after 1995. Uzbekistan’s domestic policies on human rights and individual freedoms have been criticised by some international organizations.
Uzbekistan is Central Asia’s most populous country. Its 29,559,100 population comprise nearly half the region’s total population.
Islam Abdug‘aniyevich Karimov, placed in an orphanage in Samarkand at birth, grew up to study economics and engineering at school. He became an official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, becoming the party’s First Secretary in Uzbekistan in 1989. On March 24, 1990 he became President of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.
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