Who Is Responsible for Abortions?

The falling birth rate in 1948 became a political problem, and all demographic data were made secret thereafter. V. N. Starovskii, the head of the Central Statistical Administration, suggested that the rising number of illegal abortions was the primary cause of the declining birth rate. Saddled with this allegation, the medical and legal professions undertook comprehensive study of both legal and illegal abortion, including a survey of illegal abortion, compiled through interviews with hundreds of women hospitalized after botched abortions. The results led to a shift in reformist focus from prosecution to prevention, and a new understanding of the causes underlying Soviet women’s reproductive decisions.

The Patronymic of Her Choice

As the victory over the Nazis came into sight and the demographic disaster became apparent, the Soviet leadership keenly felt the need to strengthen pronatalist policy. Several proposals submitted in 1943–1944 expanded existing pronatalist measures without a fundamental change in the vision of population growth. However, Khrushchev, proconsul of devastated Ukraine, submitted the most comprehensive overhaul based on a new vision for population and pronatalism. The government policy reveals a two-faced practice of Bolshevik language, claiming to “protect motherhood” when addressing the masses, and non-Bolshevik discourse, population engineering language, among the top leadership. In the final law, policymakers prioritized giving men the incentive to father extramarital children over assuring the overall well-being of unmarried mothers and their children. This chapter traces the creation of the 1944 Family Law, legislation that definitively shaped the postwar generation in a deeply gendered manner.

Postwar Marriage and Divorce

Given the skewed sex ratio, the 1944 Family Law created a gendered situation where marriage had practical disadvantages for men and advantages for women. Men might try to divorce prewar “wives” in order to formalize new “marriages” made during the war, but many would try to avoid marriage because of the increased cost of divorce. Women, in contrast, wanted legal marriage for a variety of reasons. Because of the strict divorce law and men’s unwillingness to legalize marriage, women’s wishes often went unrealized. Not only did the “new class” of unmarried mothers with fatherless children voice their sense of injustice, but wives in legal marriage also complained bitterly about husbands’ affairs with younger women and unpaid child support. Legal specialists and women party activists asked for amendments to the 1944 Family Law, emphasizing the harmful effects of the law on the physical and psychological health of out-of-wedlock children, but discovered that the party leadership preferred to pursue its pronatalist experiment.

Epilogue

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the first post-socialist government under Boris Yeltsin supported programs to promote contraception and sexual education. As Russia transitioned to a market economy, foreign contraceptive devices as well as high-quality household appliances became available to those who could afford them. Post-socialist liberal politicians and family planning advocates attempted to reform the USSR’s long-time reliance on abortion for fertility control. They pushed for disseminating sex education and distributing modern contraception. However, this changed when Vladimir Putin became president. Putin identified shrinking population as a national crisis, and worked with the Orthodox Church, to introduce measures to promote motherhood and restrict abortion. Although Putin’s pronatalist policy sometimes stresses the importance of responsible fatherhood, many parallels can be drawn to Soviet pronatalism.

Women’s Reproductive Right and the 1955 Re-legalization of Abortion

In the early 1950s, the USSR Ministry of Health, Ministry of Justice, All Union Central Council of Trade Unions, and State Prosecutor collectively developed ideas to improve women’s reproductive environment. While the Doctors’ Plot derailed the process, after Stalin’s death in March 1953, reform movements resumed. In 1954, journalist Elena Serebrovskaia began a public movement demanding reform of the 1944 Family Law, and many citizens, including prominent members of the intelligentsia, joined this call. Medical and legal experts believed that the time was ripe for family law reform, but nothing came out of the public movement. Instead, medical experts advanced abortion law reforms in the early 1950s, culminating in the 1955 re-legalization. Despite these developments, the key elements of the 1944 Family Law remained untouched.

Abortion Surveillance and Women’s Medicine

During World War II, Soviet doctors had become used to expressing their own views and acting on them. After the war, doctors understood that policymakers were interested in reinstituting the prewar abortion surveillance system, but they considered that women, who had suffered much in the war, needed safe abortion, not prosecution. Instead, a postwar purge in the medical field, decimated hopes for postwar alternatives. Contacts with the West ended and many Jews lost their jobs, common results of workplace purges in late Stalinism. The purge of the Moscow Institute of Obstetrics and Gynecology was no exception. Under threat, medicine gave up on the idea of helping women individually through expert judgment and private consultation. As the top health official in charge of women and children, Deputy People’s Commissar Mariia D. Kovrigina learned much about what was medically desirable and politically possible.

Beyond Replacing the Dead

After 1955, the number of clinical abortions in the USSR rose steadily. Soviet doctors of women’s medicine began developing contraception to stop the prevalent practice of multiple abortions. However, their vision of preventing abortion as a way of improving the reproductive health of Soviet women increasingly contradicted the emerging pronatalism of the 1970s. As the introduction of contraception remained blocked, doctors again made it easier for women to get clinical abortions in the early stages of pregnancy. Key postwar practices would carry over into the post-Soviet era. Meanwhile, the reformed family law of 1968 brought only superficial improvement to the legal status of out-of-wedlock children. The one-parent pronatalism that allocated unequal parental responsibilities between the mother and father was largely unchanged from 1944 until 1991.

Introduction

In 1955 the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion on the principle of women’s rights. This was the result of the postwar politics of reproduction. The socialist ideology of women and population, as well as prewar Soviet policy on family and marriage, provided important background. In the prewar period Soviet marriage had already become unstable, but it disintegrated further during World War II. Mobilization, evacuation, and warfare and genocide all played their role. This was the context in which policymakers introduced the extreme pronatalist policy that encouraged out-of-wedlock births while expecting women to work full time. The postwar history of Soviet reproductive politics and practice went beyond Russian and Soviet borders, spreading distinct socialist reproductive practices.