Doctors sterilise Uzbek women by stealth

WHEN her baby died soon after delivery, Gulbahor Zavidova, 28, a poor farmer's wife, longed to be pregnant again. After months of trying she and her husband visited a doctor who told her she could never have another child because she had been sterilised. The procedure had been performed immediately after she gave birth, by doctors who did not ask her consent. On learning she could not bear children, her husband left her. "Not a day passes without me crying," she said. "I was outraged when I found out what they had done. How could they do such a horrible thing without asking me?" According to human rights groups, tens of thousands of young women like Zavidova have been sterilised without their consent in the authoritarian former Soviet state of Uzbekistan.