Roma women in Slovakia have long been facing human rights violations and multiple discrimination in various areas of life. One of the areas is reproductive health care. Roma women encounter segregation in maternity wards, racially motivated harassment and humiliation, neglect of health care, physical constraints and abusive treatment during childbirth, or shortcomings in providing informed consent by healthcare personnel. In the past, they have faced the practice of illegal sterilization, which has not yet been thoroughly investigated and injured women duly compensated.

Together with the group of Roma women with whom we have been cooperating for a long time, we want to continue with our advocacy efforts towards the responsible state institutions and to further promote the adoption of necessary measures to protect the reproductive rights of Roma women as well as the measures to counter the practice of illegal sterilization in accordance with the international law.

Within the project, we will organize one meeting of Roma women in order to plan one advocacy activity towards the state institutions, which we will subsequently carry out.  

The project is implemented between 1 September and 30 November 2018 thanks to the financial support of Slovak-Czech Women’s Fund.