The historical continuity of the transfer from eugenics to medical genetics in postwar Czechoslovakia, which also led to introducing enforced sterilization among the Roma, can be divided into several stages reverberating with postwar reproduction of eugenic thinking at the international level. While between 1945 and 1969, Czech eugenics aligned with the mainstream movement toward the “victory” of new genetic knowledge and science about populations, after 1970, the new Western trend toward revisiting the implications of medical genetics in terms of a more profeminist view on women's autonomy and postcolonial lenses of anthropology remained on the margins of attention among socialist scholars. In fact, after 1979, while Czech genetics continued to suffer from impaired autonomization typical of academic spheres in socialist modernity, Czechoslovak practices targeted at controlling the Roma population crossed the ethical borders of science and its application. As a result sterilization exhibited all the features of an arbitrary practice. Exploring the role of sterilization and its corollary, therapeutic abortion, in the professional discourses of Czech experts between 1945 and 1985 recognizes the intersectionality of different epistemic communities, geneticists, anthropologists and helping professionals in shaping the institutional construction making forced sterilization and accompanying methods (abortion and forced contraception) not only possible but desirable measures for surveillance over the Roma.

Czech eugenics during the postwar period: Emancipation from a dirty past

Despite being short, the Third Republic period (1945-1948) was crucial for the postwar reproduction of eugenic thinking in Czechoslovakia and in particular for the legalization of sterilization in 1966.