Video: To give birth or not to give birth: How abortion commissions in the USSR decided the fate of women
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
It is known that in pre-revolutionary Russia the families of ordinary workers and peasants were quite large. As they say, how much God will send. Abortion was prohibited. But with the advent of the new state, politics changed radically. In the USSR, "abortion" commissions appeared, which decided who could have an abortion and who could not.
After the October Revolution, the new government actively promoted free morals, aiming not at the moral upbringing of newly minted Komsomol members, but at destroying the age-old Orthodox ways of the "accursed tsarism" period. In the first half of the 1920s, such circles flourished as "Down with shame!", "Down with marriage!", "Down with family!" Their members walked naked through the streets, the slogan "Komsomolskaya Pravda should not refuse a Komsomol member, otherwise she is a bourgeois" gained particular popularity.
Of course, the undesirable consequences of a promiscuous sex life were not long in coming. Women became pregnant more often than usual. And since the country actively began to build communism, it was preferable for women to be in their workplaces than to babysit their children.
In 1920, the decree "On artificial termination of pregnancy" was issued. It can be called the first document in the world that allowed women to officially have abortions. There were so many people who wanted to get rid of an unwanted child that private paid clinics began to open across the country.
The authorities soon realized that the situation was gradually spiraling out of control and created special abortion commissions. Quite an interesting excerpt from an article in the newspaper "Red Banner" in 1927:.
Judging by these statistics, not everyone was allowed to have abortions. The workers of factories and plants had no problems with this. It was there that promiscuous sexual intercourse was most often practiced, and none of the women wanted to lose their jobs later.
Permission for free abortion was primarily granted to single unemployed persons; large families employed in production; workers' wives with many children. Those who were refused could have an abortion for a fee.
Gradually, the time of permissiveness passed, and the "loose" 1920s were replaced by the "tough" 1930s. And if earlier conversations about sex, the absence of shame were encouraged, then later, as the totalitarian regime intensified, sex began to be considered something shameful, and the attitude of the authorities towards abortion turned 180 degrees.
Collectivization, industrialization and NEP pushed the entire country to accomplish literally feats. In 1935 there is The Stakhanov movement, the goal of which was to exceed the production norms many times over.
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