FOR hundreds of German men who drive across the border each week, the €55 motorway between Dresden and the Czech town of Teplice is a glorious gateway to cheap, anonymous sex.
Dozens of women line the road on the Czech side of the border, dressed in cleavage hugging t-shirts and the tiniest of hot pants. They scurry across to every car that stops, peering in the window, flashing a knowing smile and flirting in faltering German.
At £15 a time, sex south of the border is less than half the price charged by German prostitutes. Besides, the Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian and Romanian girls, many of whom are still in their mid teens, are much more biddable than their professional colleagues to the north.
For an extra £5, most will agree to risk HIV infection by having sex without a condom. Many are happy to indulge customers' bizarre fantasies for a similar supplement.
"The clients want increasingly rough things. Pregnant women are in fashion now too," said Ms Sylvia Urban, a social worker based on the €55, adding that women were often tied up, shaved and tortured with knives.
There is no shortage of pregnant prostitutes along the route, known locally as the "Street of Shame", where pimps often force women to stand on the side of the road well into their eighth month of pregnancy.
Many women seek abortions from Czech hospitals, claiming that they were raped, while others attempt to terminate their pregnancies themselves, using knitting needles or forks.
Most of the women who bring their pregnancies to full term abandon their babies immediately, often stealing out of hospital in the middle of the night and resuming their place on the side of the road within days.
Between five and 10 new born babies abandoned by prostitutes arrive at "St Joseph's Home" in the Czech town of Most every month. Blond, blue eyed children seldom remain in St Joseph's for long but the more numerous dark haired, brown eyed babies are not snapped up by adoptive parents so quickly.
Many of the babies housed in this yellow, three storey building were born with skin complaints or more serious illnesses because their mothers were suffering from syphilis when they were born. For the women on the €55, sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhoea are like the common cold, a small irritation and a brief interruption to their work.
Many pimps feed their prostitutes massive doses of antibiotics to ward off disease, not realising that they are also helping the women to build up resistance to the medicines.
The state government in Saxony has sponsored an AIDS prevention campaign aimed at teaching the €55 prostitutes the importance of safer sex practices. But many of the women are afraid to talk to social workers for fear of reprisals from their pimps, who are usually loitering nearby.
The Saxon government admits that its campaign is not motivated solely by philanthropy but is aimed at preventing the spread of HIV infection by German men who seek their thrills on the €55.
Most of the children in "St Joseph's" could find new families but for the fact that the break up of Czechoslovakia was followed by the introduction of tough new adoption laws in both countries. Children born in the Czech Republic to a Slovak mother receive no state benefit if they are adopted by a Czech family and German couples wishing to adopt children often run into problems too.
For the mothers of these children, the prostitutes who earn as little as two pounds for a 12 hour day, the Street of Shame is a road to misery.
