Univerzita Karlova

Special thanks to my yoga teacher Myrto Argyiou for the training and healing, and to my Muay Thai coach Sebastian Billard for helping me build resilience. I am grateful to my parents for bringing me up in a relatively privileged background and for letting me go my own way.

Introduction

In the second half of the eighties I attended a large municipal primary school for Hungarian speakers. The chapter analyzes Romani women's birth narratives to examine personal autonomy in the birth process.

Living Reproductive Subjectivity

They just throw them in the cradle and that's it [Jon ča thoven len are haďocis, a imar]. Ornella (interrupting): Yesterday I threw salt in the wash water [in the sink] and went into the water.

Valuing Romani Children

In the Czech Republic it was left to a handful of activists to pursue the issue of forced sterilizations and the subsequent campaign for financial compensation for survivors (see Albert, 2019). Internal armed conflict in the last two decades of the 20th century resulted in the forced sterilization of many indigenous Peruvian women (Carranza Ko, 2019), and poor women were also targets of systematic family planning efforts in Haiti (Maternowska , 2006). Kira explained that she was disgusted by the smell on the bus when it is overloaded with Roma - those from other settlements can be very dirty, she said.

The house was filled with needy children, and at one point in the afternoon, Kira exploded, exclaiming, "We should have just had three kids!" in front of the whole family. She held it against her parents that she should go to the local vocational school, where only Roma children went, instead of the one in the nearby town. A number of women in Veľká Dedinka had experience with the sterilization campaign launched in the 1980s.

Later in the interview it emerged that she had been worried about the sterilization operation and that she had run away from the hospital the first time. My informants were very aware of the sterilization scandal that occurred in the mid-2000s, and some pursued the issue of financial compensation for forced sterilizations. I asked Apricot if he thought the woman would want to have more children in the future.

Obstetric Encounters

The women (and sometimes men) I interviewed kept referring to the presence of my recording device in the room, but they did not behave like disciplined interviewees. Finally, she winked at me and said on the record that she was telling me someone else's story. Daisy: They put me in the delivery room, I gave birth and that was it [thode man pre sala, odlochiľom, a imar].

The presence of Roma women in the ward is noted to the extent that it is characterized by both relatives and other non-Roma women (see chapter 5 on the practice of ethnic separation of rooms in maternity wards). And in the morning [the doctor] says "we're going to do it, get ready, we're going to do a section". Her next birth took place in the ambulance, on the way to the maternity ward.

We were in the middle of a taped group interview when Puma suddenly remembered that she had an ultrasound appointment at the maternity ward. She reasoned that Roma women take the position of patients in a medical meeting and deserve fair treatment just like any other patient. Poor Romani women internalize the medical view, interfere little in the birthing process and mostly accept biomedical hegemony.

Rationalization, Stereotyping, and Good Patienthood at the Maternity Ward

Unfortunately, these studies reveal significant human rights violations and possible mistreatment of Roma women in the reproductive health system. According to Bowler, visibility (darker skin tone) contributes to the negative characterization of black and other immigrant mothers in the ward (1993, p. 170). They do not like loneliness, often visit other Roma women in the ward and sometimes sleep with the lights on at night.

You don't have to discuss everything with them, that's the best – [you're in] the position of power”. The staff found that with Roma women it was easy to provide good care – at least in the sense that the staff defined good care practice. Smoking becomes acceptable as an obviously inappropriate habit in the hospital - provided that Roma women are willing to negotiate the terms of their own behavior.

I also observed similar scenes (involving socks or other extra clothing such as winter coats) when Romani women went out of the hall to get coffee from a vending machine, which was placed in the immediate vicinity of the department. However, the fact that Romani women can be classified in positive ways by medical professionals has so far received little recognition in the anthropological literature. This was illustrated in the chapter by staff's willingness to negotiate Romani women's smoking practices.

A Room of Their Own: Equivocal Equality at a Czech Maternity Ward

Mothers] get nervous, and it is important to show them that they are in charge of the situation. However, in the case of Roma women, staff highlighted a shared sense of cultural belonging and natural disposition as cues that help staff adapt to the care processes that Roma women need. In the Czech Republic, as elsewhere, the extent and history of the practice is vague.

5 (a pseudo-number), the room intended for Romani women, and these are the most occupied rooms in the department. Whenever possible, non-Romani women were not placed in the Romani room, and Romani were not placed in a room other than room No. According to the interviews with staff, ethnic Czech women of any social class would basically complain if they were to be in the same room as the Roma women.

53 This transcription is an excerpt from an interview during a focus group discussion with Roma women who gave birth in the hospital where my research took place. In interviews, staff usually indicated the room to which Roma women were usually directed by number rather than by ethnicity. The health workers who participated in my research did not express explicit hostility towards Roma in the ward, nor did they profile Roma women because of ethnic animosity.

Conclusion

With regard to the position of the Czech and Slovak states towards Romani reproduction, much of the contemporary discourse to date has focused on the illegality and illegitimacy of the practice of tubal ligation, whether as a population policy, or as doctors' own illegal anti-Roma policies. initiative, which aimed to curb Romani fertility in various forms from the 1970s to the early 2000s. I want to reaffirm here that I deeply sympathize with human rights NGOs and those fighting for reproductive justice for Romani women, but my goal here was to go beyond discursively framing the women who were sterilized against their will, by force were informed or provided insufficient information. about the impact of the procedure on their future fertility, as a victim or as a survivor. Bringing to the fore the subjectivity of underprivileged Roma women, I analyzed the ways in which they strategize for their fertility choices, while at the same time recognizing the limits of human agency in reproductive matters.

The people whose perspectives I explored here pertained to the courses of action available to them based on the options currently available, and some of the decisions they made, whether in the home environment or in the maternity care environment, seem to be heavily influenced by extrinsic factors. This dissertation is inspired by, but does not directly aim to contribute to, the literature on Roma culture and religiosity (Fosztó, 2009), economics (Stewart, 1997) or exclusion (Ládanyi & Szelényi, 2006). The story I tell here is an ordered account of the stories I encountered and played along during my fieldwork.

Especially in Veľká Dedinka, I adapted to the role of the rakľi [white girl] who accompanied residents on their doctor visits, went shopping and visited relatives with them, and was grateful for any form of communal inclusion. In Továrnov's maternity ward, I sat in the hallway for hours, taking notes of the processes around me, until the opportunity arose to witness the care process, interview a birth nurse, or have a conversation with one of the women about her expectations and experiences in the department. Ethnographers must rely on their own feeling (Rosaldo, 1984) and intuition to understand the social interactions in which they participate.

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