Uzbekistan: Would You Like Some Vitamins with Your Free Hysterectomy?

When the Uzbek government gets involved in maternal health, it’s usually to help control the country’s exploding population, by any means necessary. So one could be forgiven for greeting a new government resolution to provide “pregnant women living in rural areas with special complexes of invigorating multivitamins” with a vigorous dose of skepticism. 

President Islam Karimov signed the resolution on 22 July. The measures, which are expected to cost 8 billion sums ($5 million at the official exchange rate) in 2010, fall under some ambitious rubrics: the Healthy Mother – Healthy Child program and the Year of the Harmoniously Developed Generation, designated for 2010.

A series of forced sterilization scandals has lead many to doubt Tashkent's intentions. 

Despite this new “Healthy Mother” program, the government-sponsored forced sterilization program appears to be expanding, according to recent reporting. Earlier this year, the Tashkent-based Expert Working Group claimed that authorities had ordered each Uzbek doctor to persuade at least two women of reproductive age to agree to a hysterectomy.

In at least one case, a hysterectomy was used as punishment: doctors forcibly removed the uterus of the Ferghana Region-based human rights activist and Nobel Prize nominee Mutabar Tajibayeva while she was serving a prison term in 2008, she said.