High Abortion Rates Remain Issue for Roma Women

23 June 2008

A poll conducted by the National Roma Centre (NRC) from Kumanovo, shows that almost a half of the polled Roma women live in extramarital communities, while only one in ten Roma women owns personal ID documents and proof of citizenship, which leads to the situation in which their children are not entered in the new-born children registries.

The poll was conducted under the auspices of the Prosperity and Health of Roma Women � Challenging Road, on a sample of 2,756 women from Kumanovo, Kriva Palanka, Prilep and Bitola, between the ages of 13 and 75 years.

Sebahina Skenderovska, NRC Coordinator, says that their goal was to raise the awareness of Roma women in terms of their health and to identify the health hazards faced by the Roma women.

-The poll was conducted through direct communication and conversation with the women on the importance of the regular medical check-ups and the necessary measures they need to take to preserve their health, says Skenderovska.

According to the collected data, the Roma women live in restricted housing facilities which often house three or more generation of a single family. The big sizes of Roma families can be explained by the fact that few women use contraception, which leads to great number of abortions, with 1,331 of the polled women noting they had one or more abortions.

NRC added that the 1996 survey conducted by UNICEF showed that birth-rates and infant mortality in the Roma population were far higher than with the other ethnic communities in Macedonia.