“I won’t bother to take the baby home, because I wanted a girl,” joked a new mother. “You’d better take it, because you will not have any more children,” said her doctor. “We have sterilized you.”

These words echo in the ears of Elena Gorolova, a 37-year-old Roma woman who was sterilized at age 21, after giving birth to her first and only child according to The BBC.

Her forced sterilization was a part of a nationwide plan in the Czech Republic to curb the typically high birth rate in its Roma population.

“Sterilization was used as a means of birth control,” said Kumar Vishwanathan, a Roma rights activist, to The BBC.

Members of the Roma ethnic group inhabit all areas of the globe but typically live in

Southern and Eastern Europe. As they have no traditional homeland, the Roma, sometimes called Gypsies, have a long history of being persecuted as a means of promoting the national wellbeing of the state.

Gorolova is only one of possibly thousands of Roma women who were sterilized during a period from 1973 to the present. She is also only one of 80 women in her town alone who claim they were either coerced into giving consent for the procedure or simply given one after birth without consenting at all.

Even after 1990, when the program was officially ended by the Czech Republic, women report a similar experience to Gorolova’s. Her surgery took place in 1991, and reports have surfaced in recent years of women having the same experience as recently as 2003.

Most surprising about this situation is how it hits close to home for North Carolinians. In 2002, The Winston-Salem Journal ran a comprehensive series exposing the massive eugenics program in North Carolina that, at its end, had its Eugenics Board oversee the forced sterilization of over 7,600 North Carolina residents without granting them any means of legal representation.

Meeting nearby in Raleigh, the Eugenics Board was founded and actively maintained by local economic hero, James G. Hanes.

It consisted of representatives of the attorney general’s office as well as the Departments of Mental Health, Public Health, and Public Welfare. All of its members and proponents were considered part of the “local elite” who governed the approval of sterilization – willingly or unwillingly – of thousands of residents, most of them young, female, and black.

The North Carolina Eugenics Board’s efforts were part of a nationwide trend towards eugenics during the early to mid-20th century, which “claimed that human traits such as intelligence, sexuality, and criminality were determined almost entirely by genes,” according to the 2002 Journal article.

The article also said that most states cut their sterilization programs after World War II as the atrocities of the Nazis surfaced. However, according to The Winston-Salem Journal, North Carolina did not.

“It ties to a broader theme of trying to control women’s reproduction as a part of the interest of the state rather than her interest or that of her family,” said Kathryn Schmidt, assistant professor in the women’s studies department.

“Governments have encouraged and discouraged reproduction, and a lot of times the groups being discouraged have been considered less than. In the United States this usually included women of color and the poor and is often linked to the idea that the groups are going to be a drain on society.”

Many are concerned that the sterilizations in the Czech Republic and nearby Slovakia are still taking place, and that the international community has made very little effort to address what has happened. The BBC reported as early as 1997 that sterilizations in the region were being targeted at the Roma, finding that “although Roma officially form 2.5 percent of the population, Romany women represented 22 percent of all sterilizations taking place.”

Herein lies a tragic connection between the two cases: while many only associate anti-Semitism with Hitler’s death camps, they forget millions of others who were members of ethnic groups deemed the Other according to Aryan philosophy. The highest proportion of minorities sent to death camps and subjected to the likes of Dr. Mengele, after people of Jewish descent, were Gypsies.

“Like the Jews, the Roma were brutally persecuted with an inhuman determination,” said Roman Kwiatkowski, a Polish Roma representative at a 60-year gathering of survivors at Auschwitz, to The BBC. “This genocide is part of our history.”

“Many times, governments do this to promote their idea of who (they) are as a country. What the Roma are facing, being a despised group, (is that they) are treated as a voiceless minority and because they have no home country they are continually outsiders,” said Schmidt.

Some are calling the efforts in the Czech Republic an attempt at genocide; others deny this claim based on the facts that many doctors were not given direct orders from the state to sterilize individuals and that sterilization is a common practice for many women in the country as a form of birth control.

A striking revelation, however, is that allegations of government-led sterilization of this particular minority group go as far back as the 1950’s under the Communist regime, and Western reports of the practice date back to 1997. A report on the practice states that in 1988 approximately $835,000 was paid to Roma women in the Czech region to undergo sterilization.

One thing is certain; the only effective method for preventing this sort of situation from reoccurring in world history is to create a global community that ensures the rights of all women.

“Women’s groups are able to coalesce on issues of international recognition of women’s rights and are effective because they have access to powerful Western governments that influence policy and aid,” said Schmidt.

That power has yet to be used in this circumstance.