Elena Gorolová

* 1969

  • “I was twenty one back then. I didn't come to terms I would never be able to have children again. I started to cry. Nobody cared at all. Then my husband and my mother came. He began to shout angrily, asking how was it possible that nobody let him know that this thing had occurred. They wanted to call the police. It was a problem. Nevertheless, there was nothing left to do. They told my mother that I said I did not want that little boy. It seemed strange to her, and she said she would take care of him. She tried to figure out why I said that. I don't know. As soon as they brought him into the room, I started to love him. Later, when I was at my mother's and the nurse who controls children came to visit us, we asked again about the situation, how was it done to me. And she said, that the ovaries were no longer being just ligated, that they had cut them. That I really would never be able to get pregnant again.“

  • “No reports, nothing. They only made a note in the documentation. Only with years, I found there written that I wished that, that I did not want to have children again. That's exactly how it was written there. My tears were falling while I was reading the documentation. Because I had never said that, they just wrote it there themselves. They could write the post-operative part there, the one usually included into a report, right afterward. I don't know how to explain that, it is just too sad, as it still stays inside of me. What they did to me will stay with me until I die. I did not want to have many kids. I just wanted to be a woman who has that feeling of being able to give birth. I stopped being that woman at the age of twenty-one.“

  • “At that moment, they injected me and everyone started running around. The nurse came in and had two papers with her. She said that I had to say the names might it be a boy or a girl, because they were going to put me in narcosis before the cesarean section. The second paper I signed was the permission to get sterilized. Nobody explained to me what was there written. I was out of my mind. I don’t know what I signed. They transferred me to the operating room, and there they performed the second cesarean labor and the sterilization. After that, they transferred me to the post-operative care. Then the nurse came in. I woke up from the narcosis, asking what I had had. She said it was a boy. 'I don't want him,' and I fell asleep again. They moved me to another room, the head surgeon came in and said that I had escaped the gravedigger from the shovel. I asked what they had done to me. And he said that they sterilized me. That I would never be able to have children again.“

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    Ostrava, 04.04.2019

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    Ostrava, 04.04.2019

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    Ostrava, 15.06.2022

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The head physician announced they had sterilized me. I did not understand what that meant.

Elena Gorolová in a wedding dress, 1987
Elena Gorolová in a wedding dress, 1987
photo: Archive of the witness

Elena Gorolová was born on January 2, 1969, in Ostrava. After finishing vocational school, she started at the company named Vítkovické železárny (Vítkovice Steel). At the age of twenty-one, after giving birth to her second child, the doctors in the Ostrava-Vitkovice hospital sterilized her completely without her previous knowledge. The doctors justified this intervention as a common practice, usually opted for in cases when the cesarean section has to be performed for the second time. Accepting that she would never be able to have children again was very difficult for her. Moreover, she found out she was merely the only one who experienced the same treatment, as there were other cases of women who undergone involuntarily sterilization, especially during the socialist era and at the very beginning of the 1990s. Most of the cases involved women of Romani origin. In 2006, Elena started her cooperation with a nonprofit organization named Vzájemné soužití (Life Together), whose activists believed these events resulted from the regime’s effort to regulate the birth rate of Romani women. Elena graduated from high school as a teaching assistant and then continued as a field worker at the organization Vzájemné soužití. She has become a spokeswoman for involuntarily sterilized women and dedicated her life to achieve public recognition that this method of sterilization is illegal and inhuman. Elena has had a great share in changing the proceedings of how the women patients are informed about the prospects of their own sterilization in hospitals around the Czech Republic. She has presented her story in several countries around the world and had an opportunity to give a speech at the United Nations. In 2018, Elena ranked among the BBC’s 100 most influential women of the year.