The disturbing news transports us to another time and place — Tuskegee? — but we never, ever, thought that time and place could be now — in Israel. Yet, under the pressure of a TV report, the Israeli Health Ministry has admitted that its workers have been giving long-term contraceptive shots to Ethiopian women — against their will and without their knowledge — before they emigrated to Israel and after arriving in Israel.
There is only one reason why a country would administer contraceptive injections to unsuspecting Ethiopian women — to reduce the number of Ethiopian births. And that’s exactly what happened — a 50% decline in births among Ethiopian women over the last decade, according to the TV report. Dress this up any way you want, listen to the painfully flimsy explanations from the Health Ministry. The very heart and definition of this practice is racist. Egregious. Unethical. Unforgivable.
According to an investigative report that aired on Israeli TV, Ethiopian women have been coerced or coaxed into taking Depo Provera, a contraceptive that lasts three months. The report says that Jewish aid officials administered Depo Provera before the women left Ethiopia and by health workers once inside Israel.
Coerced, yes! As in: You can’t go to Israel unless you take the shot, according to Ethiopian immigrants who spoke on the TV program.
Responding to the disclosure, the Israeli Health Ministry, which neither confirmed the allegations nor acknowledged wrongdoing, instructed doctors to stop administering the shots unless the women understood their purpose and gave their consent. Too little, too late, obviously.
“They said, ‘Come, there are vaccinations, gather everyone,’” Amawaish Alane, an Ethiopian immigrant to Israel, told reporter Gal Gabbai in the program that aired Dec. 8. Alane and others interviewed charged that workers at the Joint Distribution Committee clinic in Ethiopia told them they would face difficulties in Israel or would be denied permission to emigrate at all.
The JDC denies the charges. Health Ministry spokeswoman Einav Shimron Greenbaum also denies the accusations. But a 50% decline in birth rates is hard to deny.
Needless to say, putting a woman in the position of needlessly agonizing over the inability to conceive is a grave crime. Needless to say, Jews have been coerced to endure this grave crime before — but at the hands of their enemies. Needless to say, the right of healthy women to bear children is an essential freedom, not to be abridged.
Most shocking to us are the resonances. Sixty-five years ago, some Sephardi, religious immigrants to Israel were coerced to drop their religious practices, and their Sephardi identity was demeaned. We thought this had ended long, long ago. A racially different Jew, whether Sephardi or Ethiopian, is a Jew. Every Jew of any ethncity and race is deserving of equal treatment in Israel.
The resonances — and the irrationalities. We have long questioned the logic behind granting those Ethiopians who are not Jewish the right to immigrate to Israel under its Law of Return. What possible Jewish communal sense is there in encouraging this immigration — then in engaging in a de facto sterilization of some of these very people?
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
