Forced Sterilizations? Ethiopian Women Claim The Joint Distribution Committee And The Israel Health Ministry Forced Them To Receive Sterilization Shots

Falash Mura women who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia eight years ago reportedly told Israel Educational Television’s investigative show Vacuum yesterday that they were forced to receive injections of Depo-Provera, the long-lasting birth control drug, as a condition to allowing their immigration.

Forced Sterilizations? Ethiopian Women Claim Joint Distribution Committee And Israel Health Ministry Forced Them To Receive Sterilization Shots
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

Falash Mura women who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia eight years ago reportedly told Israel Educational Television’s investigative show Vacuum yesterday that they were forced to receive injections of Depo-Provera, the long-lasting birth control drug, as a condition to allowing their immigration.

The women claimed that Israeli representatives from the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the Health Ministry coerced them by telling them that raising large families in Israel is very difficult, that if you have many children it is hard to find work to support them, and that landlords frequently refuse to rent apartments to large families.

50,000 Ethiopian Jews have immigrated to Israel during the past 10 years. During that time, their birthrate reportedly fell by nearly 50 percent.

The women said they were told they had to take what they thought were vaccinations if they wanted to continue to receive medical care from the JDC and be allowed to immigrate.

Many continued to be given Depo-Provera shots once in Israel despite suffering side effects that included severe headaches and abdominal pains.

One woman with osteoporosis told Vacuum that she has been getting Depo-Provera shots for four years without ever being warned by doctors that Depo-Provera is dangerous for women suffering from it.

A hidden camera in an Israeli health clinic filmed an Ethiopian woman being told by a nurse that this shot is usually given only to Ethiopian women.

“[It’s given] primarily to Ethiopian women,” the nurse said, “because they forget, they don’t understand, and it’s hard to explain to them, so it’s best that they receive a shot once every three months…basically they don’t understand anything.”

The Israeli government denied all of the women’s allegations.

However, Vaccum showed a letter from the Health Ministry to Dr. Rick Hodes, the director of the JDC Medical Programs in Ethiopia. The letter praised the Hodes’ work, noting that while fewer than 5% of Ethiopians use any form of birth control, the rate among Hodes’ patients was 30%.

Rachel Mangoli, the director of the WIZO branch in Pardes Hanna, told Vaccum that in 2006 she started a program for Ethiopian children at her local absorption center. A “warning light” lit up when she realized that no babies were born to the center’s Ethiopian residents that year. She checked with the director of the local health clinic and says she was told that all the Ethiopian women at her absorption center had been given contraceptive shots because they could not be relied on to take birth control pills.

In response to Vaccum’s report, the JDC reportedly called the women’s claims “nonsense.”

“The medical team does not intervene directly or indirectly in economic aid and the Joint is not involved in the aliyah procedures,” the JDC statement noted, claiming that Depo-Provera shots are given to Ethiopian women because the JDC’s studies show that it “is the most popular form of birth control among women in Ethiopia.”

Update 5:53 am CST – In a statement issued to FailedMessiah.com, Dr. Rick Hodes, the JDC's Ethiopia medical director, denies any Falash Mura women were forced to take Depo-Provera shots.

Comments

[Joan]

I think it is high time for them to consider coming to America. Here they will be accepted and there are a multitude of services that they can avail themselves to.

[Sarek]

Wow! F-ing unbelievable!
While not deadly, it sure reminds one of the Tuskegee experiments. Sounds like the lessons of Mengele have been forgotten.

I challenge anyone to say this is not racist.

[zionist goy]

Joan, are you serious? They are jews who have made the ultimate aliya and belong in Israel. they are Israel's blessing/dilemma and need to be fully integrated into Israeli society. It is all the other infiltrators that need to be accomodated elsewhere. Israel should not be burdened with those people.Not only should the U.S. not have to absorb more people from the underdeveloped nations but i fear that these Ethiopian jews would lose what sense of Jewish identity they do have if they were settled here. Would they be more fully integrated in Crown Heights?

[dh]

Genocide

[Joan]

Would they be more fully integrated in Crown Heights?

Posted by: zionist goy | December 09, 2012 at 11:34 AM

Like a glove!

[Createfitness]

This allegation, if true (and it will be easy enough to verify), would be the final nail in the coffin for my support of Israel, until they can prove to me that they will:
a) enforce a strict separation of religion and state
b) come to terms with the extreme Israeli racism that permeates its culture at this point in history.

These people might be getting forced sterilization, when Israel needs every able bodied Jew procreating as much as possible to overcome the demographic destruction that they face, while at the same time allowing those so called "haredim" to procreate at will, live off state funded welfare in order to perpetually study useless nonsense, and slowly take over the Israeli government.

Israel is on a slow course of self immolation. Now the only question is will they be done in by external enemies, will they turn into an apartheid state or engage in outright ethnic cleansing thereby losing its last allies in the west, or will they be taken over by religious zealots alienating the entire diaspora and losing the international funding that Israeli society relies on to survive.

[Mike]

This allegation, if true (and it will be easy enough to verify), would be the final nail in the coffin for my support of Israel, until they can prove to me ...

Posted by: Createfitness | December 09, 2012 at 12:35 PM

Oh please say it ain't so!

[John Nagle, Silicon Valley, CA]

Mandatory sterilization. Concentration camps. Where have we seen that before?

[Dovid]

Arresting Jews for praying out loud at the wall while wearing prayer shawls and holding Torahs, and now sterilizing Jewish women. Israel has become, ironically, anti-semitic.

[A. Nuran]

It's cheaper than Zyklon B

[Bassy the Haredi Slayer]

I guess no one here is having sex! depo shot are very popular contraceptives here and in over 100 countries. The only side effect is that it causes some bone loss in some women, so the women who use it are advised to take some calcium supplements (it is similar issue with the pills).

Depo shots are great because you get them once every three months and you can have sex and forget about it.

In Israel Depo shots, patches and birth control pills are (almost) free in any Kupat cholim (HMO). If the Ethiopian women were not informed about the risks and benefits of depo shots, patches and pills (and condoms which are not covered) it is definitely wrong but to call depo shots sterilization shows ignorance about birth control.

[Cyra Hafise]

OK, it is positively disgusting,immoral and illegal if those women got Depo shots without their consent. However, it is wrong and inflammatory to call such a crime "forced sterilization". It most certainly is not. Depo shots are reversible and millions of women use them for contraception to prevent or space out pregnancies.

[Cyra Hafise]

If this happened, doctors need to lose lisences and there needs to be a BIG purge of ANYONE involved, from the person who signed off to the healthcare worker who gave the shot. None of this "I was following orders" nonsense.

[Dovid]

It doesn't matter whether it's temporary or permanent sterilization; the result is that women were unknowingly given contraceptives; their right to control their own reproductive choices were taken away by the government. If doctors in the USA did that to Jewish women, you'd be up in arms, rightfully so. But because it's Israel and the Jewish women are "only Ethiopians", who cares. Right?!

[Ynot]

This must be thoroughly investigated, and if it happened those who are guilty thoroughly punished. Proper medical experts can tell if the injections were given. This is reminiscent of the murders committed in the Holocaust, and must not go unpunished. Israel must break, not continue, the cycle of violence and murder of that era. As Americans, this is unacceptable, the US should insist on justice for the victims.

[Anonymous]

This is birth control, not sterilization. Please edit your headline.

[Cyra Hafise]

Dovid,

I am up in arms, and I want to see investigations, and PUNISHMENTS. Sterilization IS permanent, and words DO matter. There is no such thing as performing a "temporary steriliztion". A woman using reversible birth control is made temporarily infertle.

It makes a mockery of women in the 20th century who were forced to undergo sterilization, and believe me, those sterilizations were quite permanent. What happened to the Ethiopian women was mostly definitely a crime, a grave crime, and a violation of bodily autonomy and physician oath.

And please everyone, stop comparing this to the murders of the Holocaust. In Judaism, a person is not alive until they are born. In these cases, no embryo even formed. It is not the same as gassing millions of living people.

It can still be a grave crime against these women without bringing the Holocaust into this.

[keturah]

The State of Israel is supposed to ran by Torah....but the government in charge have a different agenda than YHWH. The Most High Giveth life and takes life, we are not supposed to interfere in that process playing demi deities! It is like the days of Antiochus....men of Israel make pacts with the gentiles to perform evil. The government wants to stop the birth of indigenous Jews in favor of the converts which have inhabited the land which have no geneolgically paternal ties to Our Abbah Gadol Yisrael/Yaacob. The same way the law was changed by the Edomites to trace lineage through the mother there by Edomite/Idomite men having children with Yisraeli and Yehudi woman to make claim on the land given to the children of Abbah Yisrael. This is the truth no one wants to talk about the reason behind the hatred.

[Debebe]

Dear Cyra Hafise,

In humanity & also in a confirmed science a person is alive way before he/she is born. Here you are telling us that this is not serilization.. what a nonesense! These woman have been forcefully and effectively barred from exercising their God given rights... and unless you are dumb, you must know that nature has put a limit to which women are capable to make it... fertility declines with age so significantly and no one knows how many of these sterilized women end up having no babies at all.