Read more
In 1955, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to re-legalize abortion on the principle of women's rights to abortion. How could this happen in Stalinist society which prohibited feminist movements?
Replacing the Dead finds an answer in previously secret archives that document the difficult decade after World War II, which killed 27 million Soviet citizens and the government's policy to increase fertility by promoting out-of-wedlock births. The result was an abortion battle between women, government, and Soviet legal and medical professionals that has continued for decades.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Glossary
- Introduction
- Chapter One: The Patronymic of Her Choice: Nikita S. Khrushchev and Postwar Pronatalist Policy
- Chapter Two: Abortion Surveillance and Women's Medicine
- Chapter Three: Postwar Marriage and Divorce: The New Single Mother and Her "Fatherless" Children
- Chapter Four: Who is Responsible for Abortions?: Demographic Politics and Postwar Studies of Abortion
- Chapter Five: Women's Reproductive Right and the 1955 Re-legalization of Abortion
- Chapter Six: Beyond Replacing the Dead: Women's Welfare and the End of the Soviet Union
- Epilogue: Reviving Pronatalism in Post-Socialist Russia
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Mie Nakachi is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Hokusei Gakuen University. She is the co-editor of Reproductive States: Global Perspectives on the Invention and Implementation of Population Policy (OUP, 2016).
Summary
Drawing on never before used archival materials, Replacing the Dead exposes the history of Soviet and Russian abortion policy.
It is not unusual for nations recovering from wars to incentivize their populations to raise their birthrates. The post-World War II Soviet pronatalism campaign attempted this on an unprecedented scale, aiming to replace a lost population of 27 million. Why, then, did the USSR re-legalize abortion in 1955?
Mie Nakachi uses previously hidden archival data to reveal that decisions made by Stalin and Khruschev under the rubric of 'family law' created a society of broken marriages, “fatherless” children, and abortions, each totaling in the tens of millions. The government reversed laws regarding paternal responsibility, thereby encouraging men to impregnate unmarried women and widows, and blocked available contraception, overriding the advice of the medical establishment. Some 8.7 million out-of-wedlock children were born between 1945 and 1955 alone. In the absence of serious commitment to supporting Soviet women who worked full-time, the policy did extensive damage to gender relations and the welfare of women and children. Women, famous cultural figures, and Soviet professionals initiated a movement to improve women's reproductive health and make all children equal. Because Soviet leaders did not allow any major reform, an abortion culture grew among Soviet women and spread throughout the Soviet sphere, including Eastern Europe and China.
Based on groundbreaking research, Replacing the Dead traces how the idea of women's right to an abortion emerged from an authoritarian society decades before it did in the West and why it remains the dominant method of birth control in present-day Russia.
Additional text
The analysis of the Soviet family policy of the post-war period against the background of the internal institutional debates is carried out at a high level and sets standards in this respect.
