For the last ten years or so, the Serbs have been in danger of disappearing – yes, that’s right, completely and utterly – a decrease in numbers of Serbs has been blamed on “new trends coming from the west”, such as contraception and “women who pursue carrier instead of trying to conceive”, together with “more and more gay people popping up all the time because of the latest fashion.”
Campaigns launched to try and help with this matter, both governmental or private, didn’t appear to be working – it seemed as if the Serbs just refused to mate and multiply! There was Patriarch calling for women to multiply, there were TV shows titled “It’s time for babies!”, even the latest agreement between ruling coalition partners includes the paragraph that says they will try to help increase the number of Serbs, not to mention various other subliminal messages in the press and TV and so on. But nothing helped.
Why don’t the women just simply start having babies, that can’t be so hard, right? Nobody knew what’s wrong.
Until couple of days ago a blog post entitled Why Serbs should simply die of white plague (white plague is an informal term used for nations with not enough Sarah Palins) hit a nail on the head.
Blogger Krugolina described what it is like for her to give birth to a child in Serbia or more precisely, in a Serbian state-owned hospital. After she got an enormous amount of email by other women who had the same bad treatment like she did, she started a website Majka Hrabrost (Mother Courage) dedicated to horror stories from Serbian maternity wards, cold and cruel nurses and doctors who treat mothers like farmers treat cows. Unless you have a good connection in a hospital or enough money to bribe all the nurses and doctors that need to be bribed. Stories from Serbian women who gave birth abroad, in the West, helped create a comparison between what it’s like for a mother in Serbia and how it should be if some money is invested in educating doctors and nurses, together with creating better conditions in hospitals.
So it turns out that instead of spending all that money on TV shows, campaigns, sponsored articles and other ways of shouting “Give birth!” the government should have spent it on renovating the hospitals, and making it easy for women to deliver a baby.
Krugolina is invited to have a chat with the Serbian Health Minister, after a petition she made got couple of thousand signatures in two days and after the press got hold of the story. She currently invites people on her blog to suggest questions she might ask the Minister. It is a case of a simple citizen action that could actually help change the current poor state in Serbian maternity wards.
Viktor, thank you for this important blog! When we hear about Serbia in the news abroad, we hear only of political issues between Serbia and Kosovo. It is very rare to hear about the problems within Serbia, particularly regarding the crumbling and insufficient (and inefficient) infrastructure. I wonder, are the political battles over Kosovo that had been waged for the past decade as much a distraction from Serbia’s other problems as a genuine issue?