Developing the new socialist Czechoslovak state: abortion,eugenics, and the politics of choice between 1945 and 1962

ABSTRACT

The author analyzes the political and medical discourses surrounding the legalization of abortion in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and the establishment of the institution of abortion commissions to approve women’s demands. Through a genealogical intersectional lens, she explores the continuity of this rationality, which started to fear the degeneration of the collective more than its depopulation. As the Cold War commenced, for the first time in history Czechoslovak women obtained reproductive rights, particularly when a pregnancy was recognized as a threat to women’s and children’s health. Drawing on biopolitical theories and other critical feminist scholarship that have problematized the liberal underpinnings of choice and autonomy, the author demonstrates how eugenics trespassed from expert circles into politics, and, with the help of planned parenthood, recreated a complex system of socio-biological classes, determining who should reproduce and whose life was worth living, and worth protecting. The text defies the classic totalitarian thesis that divides peoples and society into two types, the totalitarian subject and its liberal counterpart. The author argues that, regardless of the political system, abortion rights operate as a regulatory strategy of power aimed at maintaining a certain population optimum by re-defining women’s responsibilities to deliver a healthy child into a healthy environment.