Israel admits forcibly injecting Ethiopian Jews with Depo-Provera

JERUSALEM, January 31, 2013, (LifeSiteNews.com) - After a series of back and forth accusations and denials among government agencies, the Israeli Health Ministry has for the first time acknowledged that it has been injecting Ethiopian immigrants who are religiously Jewish with the dangerous contraceptive Depo-Provera without their consent.

The allegation that the women were coerced into accepting the shot was denied at first by both the Joint Distribution Committee, which runs the clinics at the transit camps, and by the Health Ministry. The practice has been said to be going on for years.

Ethiopian Jews accounted for 57 percent of Depo-Provera users in Israel, although they constitute a miniscule percentage of the population.

According to a Haaretz report, women in transit camps in Ethiopia waiting to emigrate to Israel were either told the birth control injection was mandatory, or that the injection was simply for immunization.

"We said we won't have the shot," one woman told the Israeli newspaper. "They told us, if you don't, you won't go to Israel. And also you won't be allowed into the Joint (American Joint Distribution Committee) office, you won't get aid or medical care."

"We were afraid," recounted Emawayish, who immigrated from Ethiopia eight years ago. "We didn't have a choice. Without them and their aid we couldn't leave there. So, we accepted the injection. It was only with their permission that we were allowed to leave."

“They told us they are inoculations,” said another women interviewed for the investigative report. “They told us people who frequently give birth suffer. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.”

"We believe it is a method of reducing the number of births in a community that is black and mostly poor," Hedva Eyal, who wrote the report admitting the eugenic practice. In recent years, Israeli schools have denied Ethiopian children enrollment in schools, and the government has engaged in mass deportations of African immigrants, to preserve "the Jewish character of the state." Ethiopians also have more than three-times the poverty rate of other Israelis.

The situation came to light following an investigative report aired in early December on the Israel Educational Television program "Vacuum."

The Jewish Agency, which is responsible for Jewish immigration from abroad, distanced itself from the accusations saying that "while the JA has never held family planning workshops for this group in Ethiopia or at immigrant absorption centers in Israel, the immigrant transit camp in Gondar, as the investigation noted, was previously operated by other agencies."

However, earlier this week, a letter from Health Ministry Director General Prof. Roni Gamzu instructed the health and immigration organizations to stop giving immigrant women the dangerous drug.

According to Haaretz, Gamzu’s letter instructs all gynecologists in the HMOs "not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment.”

Gamzu also told doctors they should have an interpreter on hand if a language problem arises.

Sharona Eliahu-Chai of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, who as a representative of several women’s rights and Ethiopian immigrants’ groups had demanded that the injections cease and that an investigation be launched, applauded Gamzu’s directive.

"Findings from investigations into the use of Depo-Provera are extremely worrisome, raising concerns of harmful health policies with racist implications in violation of medical ethics. The Ministry of Health’s director-general was right to act quickly and put forth new guidelines,” Eliahu-Chai said.

Depo-Provera has been at the forefront of foreign-funded birth control programs in the developing world.

Last year Melinda Gates, wife of billionaire tech mogul Bill Gates, said that she intends to spend billions of dollars on a global campaign to promote the use of artificial birth control, highlighting Depo-Provera as her abortifacient contraceptive of choice.

The hormonal contraceptive causes abortions by preventing implantation of the newly-conceived human life in the uterine wall.

Numerous studies have linked the controversial drug with bone loss (osteoporosis), increased risk of blood clots, breast cancer, cervical cancer, increased herpes susceptibility, heart disease, memory loss, and, by compromising a woman's immune system, increases the risk of infection from STDs, and contributes to the spread of HIV/AIDS.

From The Guardian:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100200874/how-true-is-it-that-israel-deceitfully-gave-ethiopian-jews-birth-control-injections/

How true is it that Israel deceitfully gave Ethiopian Jews birth control injections?

By Brendan O’NeillWorldLast updated: January 31st, 2013

154 CommentsComment on this article

Ethiopian Jewish leaders recite prayers during the Sigd festival in Jerusalem. (Photo: AFP)

When it was reported earlier this week that Israeli officials had been giving birth control to arriving Ethiopian Jews “without their consent”, the international media had a field day. Twitter lapped it up, too. Here was hard evidence, observers said, of Israeli racism. Some even used the word “sterilisation” and haughtily reminded Israelis that the Holocaust, that thing they go on about all the time, also started with the sterilisation of “undesirables”. Echoing Lib Dem MP David Ward’s recent chastisement of “the Jews” for failing to learn anything from their experiences during the Holocaust, bloggers and observers accused Israel’s sterilisers of repeating the very history that Israel’s founders sought to escape from.

But how true is it that Israel “forced” or “coerced” Ethiopian Jews into taking birth control, without even telling them it was birth control? An interesting piece in Haaretz says it isn’t very true, and “the more [this] story is repeated, the more warped and distorted it becomes”. Haaretz says it is certainly the case, as revealed in an Israeli TV documentary in December, that Israel’s immigration authorities are guilty of “insensitivity” and “cultural condescension” towards Ethiopian Jews, and perhaps a “certain level of racism”. The article says these African Jews were indeed given Depo-Provera, a birth-control injection that lasts for three months, both in Addis Ababa, as they waited to go to Israel, and also in the absorption centres they first stayed in upon arrival in Israel. But it is not the case – or it certainly has not been proven by anyone – that they were given these injections deceitfully, without their consent, being misled into believing they were just inoculations.

Haaretz says the Ethiopian women were “coaxed” or “strongly convinced” to have the Depo-Provera shot, not forced. The idea that they were given it without their knowledge springs from the testimony of a few women who simply said “they weren’t aware the shots were birth control”; that could be down to these individual women’s lack of understanding or confusion, says Haaretz, since “the vast majority of the Ethiopian women who received Depo-Provera were aware it was birth control and received it willingly”.

As for the claims that Israel is “sterilising” immigrants it doesn’t like very much, Haaretz points out that, by definition, an injection whose birth-controlling power lasts only three months is not sterilisation. It also points out that some Ethiopian women continued voluntarily to receive Depo-Provera even once they were settled in Israel, because they “preferred being injected at a clinic rather than having to take pills daily in the presence of other family members who might disapprove of that decision”. That is, the injections became culturally convenient for some Ethiopian women in Israel. Haaretz says it is “insulting to these women’s intelligence” to suggest they would continue travelling to a clinic in Israel in order to stand in line to be “sterilised”, and in truth the drop in the Ethiopian birth rate in Israel that observers fretted over this week is far more likely “attributable to access to birth control that these women wanted”.

None of this nuance and very little of the detail of the original Israeli TV exposé made it into the international coverage this week, where instead the story was treated as “some kind of villainous genocidal plot of sterilisation aimed at ethnic and racial cleansing”, says Haaretz. Yes, Israeli officials screwed up in their treatment of these Ethiopian women; no woman should ever feel pressured, even slightly, into taking birth control, especially by those who hold the key to her ability to start a new life. (This is something that all those respectable, Western, condom-waving NGOs in Africa should also bear in mind.) But the mistreatment of this story, the exaggeration of it, the warped repeating of it by observers and tweeters around the world, reveals something ugly too: a thirst for treating Israel as a uniquely racist, wicked, barbaric outpost. When it comes to pointing a big, white Western finger at Israel and accusing it of carrying out the kind crimes of racism and colonialism that the rest of us grew out of years ago – a favoured pastime of so many liberal campaigners today – it seems facts count for little.

Morgana, AGP (another great post).

New world order, woo-hoo !

It has a number of moving parts.

Us “little people” can’t see some of them.

How many Americans know that an unclassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was delivered to a U.S. President which specified that the spread of AIDS worldwide was a national security threat to the United States ? How many people understand the significance of an NIE ?

Not many of us “little people” can understand what the goals is. How does providing birth control, contraception - or even disease prevention tie in with new world order plans ?

We don’t know.

We are like mice in a lab. The mice do not know why things are done to them. The mice can not read. The mice can not analyze.

I can’t prevent you from jumping to conclusions, but I can try to make you aware that you are tarring the entire State of Israel based on a headline that does not match the facts in the story, and you ridicule an article that does.

The story seems to be that for years the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, a Jewish philanthropy that has been helping Ethiopian Jews to Israel, has been administering depo-previra to Fulash Mura women en route to Israel from Ethiopia. These are people who are baly discriminated against in Ethiopia and they represent the only time in recorded history in which oppressed black Africans have been rescued from that continent to live as free people elsewhere.

As part of the healthcare administered to the immigrants the JDC administers a temporary (3-month) contraceptive. The JDC maintains that it is voluntary and administered after it is explained (informed consent) and at least a few women over a period of years have said that they didn’t understand that it was a contraception or were made to feel that it was a necessary condition to their being permitted to immigrate to Israel. Apparently depo-previra is widely used bgy welfare organizations that administer aid to African people in that area, and perhaps the JDC people learned it from the other aid workers.
I don’t like the idea that they may have administered depo-previra without fully explaining its effects or that they coerced people to take it, but it is a 3-month contraceptive that is generally recognized as safe and with no lasting effects either on the woman’s ability to give birth or on any other aspects of her health that I could find. This is NOT Margaret Sanger-type forced sterilization.

In any case, as soon as an Israeli television program highlighted the practice in December the JDC spokespeople issued a denial of coercion/inadequate explanation.

Now the Israeli government has said that it wants to discontinue prescriptions of depo-previra to Ethiopian immigrant women in Israel pending the results of an investigation, and for its own reasons this news service has chosen to headline the article with a libel that the Israeli government has admitted to guilt. It looks to me that they don’t want to administer a drug to anyone without their consent and they are right to place these prescriptions on hold, even though it will cause hardship to those women who will find their own prescriptions unable to be renewed.

I am having a difficult time imputing innocent motives to the headline writer who took the practices of the JDC, the allegations of coercion, and the Israeli government’s efforts to stop any coercion that may be happening, and wrote a headline claiming that Israel’s government has admitted guilt.

And for those of you who compare this to forced sterilization, you should read before you write.

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