Overview

As the predominant form of birth control in Soviet society, abortion reflected key paradoxes of state socialism: women held formal equality but lacked basic needs such as contraceptives. With market reforms, Russians enjoyed new access to Western contraceptives and new pressures to postpone childbearing until economically self-sufficient. But habits of family planning did not emerge automatically—they required extensive physician retraining, public education, and cultural transformation. In Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture,Rivkin-Fish examines the creative strategies of Russians who promoted family planning in place of routine abortion. Rather than emphasizing individual rights, they explained family planning’s benefits to the nation—its potential to strengthen families and prevent the secondary sterility that resulted when women underwent repeat, poor quality abortions. Still, fierce debates about abortion and contraceptives erupted as declining fertility was framed as threatening Russia’s demographic sovereignty. Although Russian family planners embraced a culturally meaningful liberalism that would rationalize public policy and re-enchant relations, nationalist opponents cast family planning as suspicious for its association with the individualistic, ""child-free"" West. This book tells the story of how Russian family planners developed culturally salient frameworks to promote the acceptability of contraceptives and help end routine abortion. It also documents how nationalist campaigns for higher fertility worked to de-fund family planning and ultimately dismantle its institutions. By tracing these processes, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture demonstrates the central importance of reproductive politics in the struggle for liberalizing social change that preceded Russia’s 2022 descent into war, repression, and global marginalization.

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9780826506979

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Reviews

""In this searing account of Russian family planners' strategic efforts to 'fight abortion, not women' under Soviet and post-Soviet regimes, Rivkin-Fish reveals the acute costs to both women and health institutions when reproductive health care is approached as state biopolitics."" --Heather Paxson, author of Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece ""This fascinating modern history illustrates how state-sponsored, religiously orthodox pronatalism in Russia has limited access to birth control and safe abortion--causing both women and family planning advocates to suffer. An important cautionary tale about why punitive reproductive regimes and illiberal-nationalist visions matter so greatly in the world today."" --Marcia C. Inhorn, author of Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs ""Drawing on a rich set of ethnographic data and historical materials, this incredibly important book will be widely read across a number of fields: medical anthropology, medical sociology, science and technology studies, health studies, women's studies, Soviet/post-Soviet studies, and many others."" --Melissa L. Caldwell, author of Living Faithfully in an Unjust World: Compassionate Care in Russia

Author Information

Michele Rivkin-Fish is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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