Jarmila Adiová: The Czech state threatened to institutionalize my children if I didn't have an abortion, later I learned they also sterilized me

Adiová has applied for the compensation of CZK 300,000 [EUR 12,000] currently being offered by the Czech state and is still waiting to see whether it will be awarded to her. For the time being the official deadline for filing requests for such compensation is 2 January 2025.

Some politicians are now proposing to extend that deadline by another two years, though. Adiová was living a contented family life with her husband and five sons before the intervention.

The entire family was looking forward to their next child, whom they all hoped would be a little girl. “My husband and I had been preparing for it to be a little girl. He actually looked forward to that, he was glad and kept saying ‘I hope it will be a girl and not another boy’, because we already had five sons. I was also looking forward to it very much,” Adiová told ROMEA TV.

“We were a normal, functional family, the children were doing well and everything was fine,” she recalls their life before the intervention. However, their plans were thwarted by pressure from social workers threatening to institutionalize her children unless she aborted her pregnancy.

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“The social workers started coming to our home and they were always looking for something wrong, they deliberately invented stories to see whether our household lacked something it shouldn’t. Back then it was the case that if they saw you had more children, they immediately told me that I was ‘giving birth like a cat’ and that they would not keep disbursing me welfare benefits all the time. They proposed that I get rid of the child I was expecting. They said that if I didn’t, they would take my other children and put them in an institution. I was out of my mind with fear, my husband was, too. We didn’t want to do it at all, but ultimately they forced me to do it so I could keep my five children at home,” Adiová told ROMEA TV.

After the abortion, Adiová found out that she would never conceive again. Without fully understanding the repercussions, she had been forced to undergo sterilization as well as an abortion.

“I had no idea that I would no longer be able to have children. It was not until the operation was over that my husband and family told me it was irreversible. That shock marked me for life,” Adiová described.

To this day Adiová is being treated for the longstanding mental problems resulting from that experience. Suspicions that Romani women were being subjected to forced sterilizations in the Czech Republic were raised in 2004 by the European Roma Rights Centre.

The illegal sterilizations were undertaken in the former Czechoslovakia and in the Czech Republic for decades and were most often performed on Romani women. They were subjected to pressure and to threats that their children would be institutionalized unless they underwent the surgery and were not properly informed about the nature of the surgery being recommended to them.

Dozens of women contacted the ombudsman about their treatment and several have also sued in court. According to the compensation law now in effect in the Czech Republic, victims have been able to request compensation since 2022, but the opportunity to apply ends on 2 January 2025.

Politicians in the Czech Republic agree it is necessary to extend this opportunity by another two years. Just like other victims of forced sterilizations, Adiová has applied for the CZK 300,000 [EUR 12,000] in compensation being offered.

Adiová does not yet know whether she will be awarded the compensation. “The money will not heal these wounds. I wanted my sons to have a sister. They took that chance away from me, though,” she told news server ROMEA TV.

She hopes her story will support other women who are fighting for justice: “This is not just about me, but about all the women who went through this. All we wanted was to have families and children, but they denied us that.”