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This article examines Soviet reproductive politics after the Communist regime legalized abortion in 1955. The regime's new abortion policy did not result in an end to the condemnation of abortion in official discourse. The government instead launched an extensive campaign against abortion. Why did authorities bother legalizing the procedure if they still disapproved of it so strongly? Using archival sources, public health materials, and medical as well as popular journals to investigate the antiabortion campaign, this article argues that the Soviet government sought to regulate gender and sexuality through medical intervention and health "education" rather than prohibition and force in the post- Stalin era. It also explores how the antiabortion public health campaign produced "knowledge" not only about the procedure and its effects, but also about gender and sexuality, subjecting both women and men to new pressures and regulatory norms.
A forlorn-looking woman and man peer at an empty crib filled only with the words "Abortion will deprive you of happiness."1 (Figure 1) This image surprisingly was not produced when abortion was outlawed in the Soviet Union but rather in 1966, many years after abortion was, for the second time, legalized. A product of the antiabortion campaign that accompanied the legalization of abortion in 1955, the poster illustrates two of the campaign's main narratives: that abortion could destroy a woman's reproductive capacity and that it could destroy family happiness. Viewed in historical context, the image reflects and reinforces broader efforts to exert "soft" control over the Soviet population in the post-Stalin era through reconfiguring gender roles and sexual norms.
Communist authorities first legalized abortion in 1920, only to change course during the Stalin era and recriminalize it in 1936 (except for very limited medical conditions). Whether abortion was criminalized or legalized, abortion policy in both the pre and postwar eras was justified in the same way: concern for women's wellbeing.2 The 1955 policy shift was the culmination of growing concern in the late 1940s and early 1950s among Soviet officials and medical personnel about the high number of illegal abortions and their associated costs. The government initially resisted decriminalizing abortion, instead expanding antiabortion education, the medical policing of reproduction, and the range of medical conditions under which abortion was authorized. But after Stalin died...