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.
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