Photo: Andreas Hackl/IRIN. Women of Ethiopian origin at a human rights demonstration in Tel Aviv
Source: IRIN
TEL AVIV, 28 January 2013 (IRIN) - The director of the Ministry of
Health in Israel, Roni Gamzo, has issued a formal directive instructing
that gynaecologists should not inject women with the contraceptive
Depo-Provera without their knowledge or consent.
The directive, issued last week, comes after around 30 Ethiopian Jews
who had emigrated to Israel said they had been told that they would not
be allowed into the country without receiving the contraceptive drug.
Within Israel, Ethiopian Jews make up the majority of those given the
drug, according to a report published in 2010 by Isha le'Isha, a women’s
rights organization; 57 percent of women who had received the drug in
Israel are Ethiopian Jews, although they account for less than 2 percent
of the overall population.
“We believe it is a method of reducing the number of births in a
community that is black and mostly poor,” Hedva Eyal, the author of the
report, told IRIN. “It is indeed the first time that the state actually
acknowledged that this procedure of injecting immigrant women with this
drug, when they do not know the side effects and are given no other
choice, is wrong.”
The directive was issued less than two weeks after a group of
organizations representing the Jewish Ethiopian community, along with
the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), sent a letter to
Gamzo asking that this practice be stopped immediately and that an
investigation be started into it both in Israel and in the transit camps
in Ethiopia.
Ministry of Health deputy spokesperson Smadar Shazo told IRIN that while
the directive was issued after the letter from the organizations, the
ministry had begun investigating the matter a few months ago in an
attempt to determine who was behind this policy in both Israel and the
transit camps in Ethiopia.
“We started the research [for the 2010 report] after an article in one
of the dailies reported a steep decline in the number of babies born in
the Ethiopian community, which is a young, supposedly fertile
community,” said Eyal.
Over 120,000 Jews of Ethiopian descent live in Israel today; 83,000 of them were born in Ethiopia.
Between 1985 and 1991, more than 30,000 were airlifted in three rescue
operations after years of civil war and famine had driven hundreds of
thousands of Ethiopians into the capital, Addis Ababa, and refugee camps
in Sudan.
But their integration
into Israeli society has not been easy; about 52 percent of
Ethiopian-Israeli families live below the poverty line, compared to 16
percent among the general Jewish Israeli population.