In 1920, the USSR became the first country to legalize abortions at the request of a woman, but four years later the right to abortion was limited, and in 1936 there came out a decree banning abortions altogether. In this article, gender researcher Sasha Talaver tells how the abortion ban in the USSR affected women. Soviet women themselves talk about the same thing in their letters to the government with requests to lift the abortion ban. We publish excerpts from those letters here.
“I have not yet forgotten the pain of previous births.” “I don’t have the strength to bear two children a year.” “I am not a machine that produces children twice a year.” These are quotes from letters by Soviet women that were used to lobby for the decriminalization of abortion in the USSR in 1955.
Abortion in the USSR was allowed in 1920, banned in 1936 and allowed again in 1955. Despite the hopes of the authorities, the 1936 ban did not lead to a sustainable increase in the birth rate. As demographer Anatoly Vishnevsky wrote, after a brief increase in the number of births in the late 1930s, the figures began to decline again. The ban itself could not overcome the socio-economic difficulties that families faced: poverty, lack of housing, lack of real assistance for large families. Women continued to look for ways to avoid unwanted pregnancies, often at risk to their own lives.
Vishnevsky emphasized that a policy based on prohibitions, rather than support, could not be effective. Without improving living conditions and real care for motherhood, the birth rate remained low. In this sense, the abortion ban was not only repressive in its nature, but also an ineffective tool for demographic regulation. It seems that the Russian authorities still remember this lesson, and therefore do not risk banning abortion completely yet.
These letters are remarkable not only because they show the grave consequences of the abortion ban and the desperate situation of mothers with many children who are ready to self-abort, debunking the myth that only selfish young cat ladies do that. But also because of the language of the description of motherhood.
In these letters there is no trace of the myth that surrounds motherhood as a natural need of a woman, as the happiness of self-realization. No, this is a description of hard work, pain — the denaturalization of motherhood. This language is consonant, for example, with the texts of Kollontai, who was convinced that the maternal instinct is a product of certain circumstances and will inevitably transform with the change in the economic order.
Perhaps she was right.
Along with the decriminalization of abortions in the USSR, a large campaign to glorify motherhood was launched. It was as if the officials who reluctantly allowed abortion saw a dangerous signal in these letters and began active work to equate motherhood with happiness, rather than motherhood with unpaid, hard (and often thankless) labor.
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