Abortion in the Soviet Union
On November 18, 1920, the Soviet Union became the first modern state to legalize abortion. A decree from the People’s Commissariat for Public Health allowed women to terminate their pregnancies free of charge and on both medical and non-medical grounds. Given that abortion was criminalized in virtually every other Western country at the time, this unprecedented event enjoys almost universal acclaim among progressives today.
Denouncing measures introduced in late 2023 by several Oblasts in Russia to restrict abortion advertising, the English language news outlet The Moscow Times recalls that “The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to allow abortion, and until this year, modern Russia has had some of the world’s most liberal abortion legislation.” “In most countries, feminist movements had to fight for decades for abortion rights. But not in the Soviet Union,” writes the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights in an April 2024 statement on the growing opposition to abortion from the Russian state.
Such rhetoric speaks to a peculiar trend in Western assessments of Soviet history. Communism is redeemable—and the Soviet Union a contributor to human progress—to the extent that it has helped facilitate lifestyle liberties to be enjoyed by women and other “marginalized” groups. Communism’s successes in this regard call for emulation; its failures serve as a cautionary tale. Accordingly, one activist Sebastiano Porcu complains that “past socialist states . . . provide guidance on securing reproductive justice” but had “failed to address the needs and concerns of nonbinary, gender queer, and transgender individuals.” Others like Samuel Huneke, a historian of gender and sexuality in the Cold War-era Eastern Bloc, insist that communism had created “havens for LGBTQ rights.”
The truthfulness of these statements aside, the fact that they are uttered at all confirms the hegemony of the sexual revolution and its priorities. Unsurprisingly, modern progressives balk at the eventual banning of abortion in 1936 under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. To feminist author Anne McShane, not being able to have abortions meant “Women were forced along with men to submit to the brutalizing authoritarian regime of Stalinism.” An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times even compares the ban to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The view that Stalin represents a reactionary backlash was popularized by Leon Trotsky. In his 1937 book The Revolution Betrayed, the dissident Bolshevik decried in exile what he saw as a “Thermidor in the family.” The term “Thermidor” evokes the period in the French Revolution when the Jacobin faction led by Maximilian Robespierre was ousted from power, and a suppression of radical forces ensued. Trotsky blamed Stalin for betraying the Soviet sexual revolution. Yet, by all accounts, there was no revolution from the outset. To quote historian Elizabeth Waters, Soviet Russia was a society that, while espousing utopian visions for the family, “paid homage to nature and did not question the maternal instincts of women or seek to emancipate them from their monopoly on the nurturing role.”
Contrary to modern narratives that hail the Soviet Union as the first country to enshrine abortion rights, a closer examination of the 1920 decree “on the protection of public health” suggests that abortion was never made a right to begin with. The preamble to the law reads as follows:
[The state] combats abortion by reinforcing the socialist regime and the anti-abortion campaign conducted among working women and by making provision for mother and child welfare. This will lead to the gradual disappearance of the practice. However, the traces of the past and current economic conditions lead women to have recourse still to this operation. The People’s Commissariat for Health and the People’s Commissariat for Justice, . . . considering that repression in this field has not given the expected results, decrees [that abortion is legal].
Put differently, abortion was a necessary evil whereby women could alleviate the dire economic straights in which they find themselves. In the future, women would no longer require abortions, at least for non-medical reasons, since the state would assume the burden of childcare, thus eliminating concerns over the affordability of children.
Implementing “the theory that standard of living and need for birth control are inversely related,” a class-based priority system was set up in 1924. Women must fill out a questionnaire asking for their social background and reasons for seeking an abortion. Single unemployed women qualified for first preference, followed by “single and working, with children,” “industrial workers with several children,” “wives of manual workers with several children,” “other women with social insurance,” and “other women.” Abortion requests were vetted by a three-person committee consisting of a physician and a member from each of the two state agencies charged with overseeing the provision of abortions, the Commissariat for Health’s Division for the Protection of Maternity and Infancy and the Women’s Division of the Communist Party.
If the law shapes public perceptions of what is normative, the 1920 decree and subsequent regulations on abortion could be said to reinforce the view that child rearing is the default for women. This neo-traditionalist ethos was implicitly endorsed even by Leon Trotsky, who was otherwise a critic of gender roles. To him, women would always beget children, so “a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters” of family life necessitates “[t]he complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society.” Despite Karl Marx having called for the abolition of the family, communism in practice concedes the inevitability of the family, which persists in a new, publicly subsidized form: “You cannot ‘abolish’ the family; you have to replace it [through the state],” Trotsky writes.
Abortion, on the other hand, follows from a bourgeois plot against the family. Much like prostitution, abortion is a last resort for impoverished women in societies where, according to Marx in The Communist Manifesto, “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” Abortion also speaks to a Malthusian pessimism that revolutionaries ought to abhor. Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union, notwithstanding his support for female participation in politics, reacted to a 1913 conference where doctors called for legalizing abortion in the then Russian Empire by railing against “unfeeling and egotistic petty-bourgeois couples, who whisper in scared voices: ‘God grant we manage somehow by ourselves. So much the better if we have no children.’” Unlike “a class that is hopelessly perishing, that despairs of its future,” Lenin believed, “We [the working class] are already laying the foundation of a new edifice, and our children will complete its construction.”
Soviet propaganda in the 1920s illustrates the application of these ideologies. In a poster titled “By destroying capitalism, the proletariat will destroy prostitution,” a giant man wielding a hammer extends his hand to rescue a barefoot woman as he tramples upon a throng of bloated capitalists gathered around her. Sexual debauchery under the old regime is contrasted with the blessings women enjoy under the new. “What the October Revolution gave to the worker and peasant woman” depicts a woman in an apron gesturing towards numerous buildings with signs that read “mother’s house,” “kindergarten,” and “school for adults.”
In that sense, communism shares its critique of industrial modernity’s subversion of traditional family values with a host of conservative thinkers from George Fitzhugh in the Antebellum South to Christopher Lasch in the late 20th Century. Their perspective is best articulated by G. K. Chesterton in his 1920 book The Superstition of Divorce: beyond a coercive state, “An even more ferocious enemy of the family is the factory.” The law also reflected fears that a free market left unchecked would drive women away from the home. In the 1908 case Muller v. Oregon, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Oregon law capping the maximum number of hours women could contract to work for, since “a proper discharge of her maternal functions . . . justify legislation to protect her from the greed, as well as the passion, of man.” The Soviet state, by identifying abortion with “bourgeois exploitation,” likewise saw the tension between laissez-faire economics and family life.
Even those independent Soviet voices who were not particularly concerned with preserving the family and were sympathetic to alternative lifestyles did not see abortion as something to be celebrated. Abram Room’s 1927 silent film Bed and Sofa, known for its brazen portrayal of a ménage à trois between a woman and two men, offers clues on how abortion was viewed by the Soviet avant-garde. In the film, a husband invites his friend to stay at the apartment he shares with his wife. The friend seduces the wife, and the husband later consents to trading places with him on the bed and the sofa. When the wife becomes pregnant, the two men insist she get an abortion. At the clinic, the wife is surrounded by prostitutes as she anxiously awaits her turn. Then, looking out an open window, she sees a baby in a blanket, prompting her to leave the clinic. The film ends with the wife fleeing her lovers and deciding to have the child somewhere else. Abortion is presented here as a cruel demand placed on a reluctant woman by predatory men. A strong, independent woman defies them and dares to raise children by herself.
The medical community played no small part in normalizing childbirth. Historian Susan Gross Solomon notes that a majority of the obstetricians and gynecologists surveyed before the 1920 decree was passed had been against legalizing abortion. In the early 1920s, many vigorously protested by emphasizing the ways abortion harmed women’s health. Their understanding of health was pro-natal: fertility is a good in itself, and a healthy woman is one who is fertile. For instance, Dr. M. Karlin found that in the first six months of 1923, the fertility rate of women in Leningrad who only had abortions was about 1.87, but that of women who had no abortions was 2.12. His colleague, Dr. Bublichenko, thus concluded that abortion harmed women.
As reliable statistics began to emerge, thanks to the questionnaires that abortion-seekers had to complete, arguments against legalization shifted away from focusing on women’s health and towards the demographic and moral consequences of abortion. At the 1927 All-Ukrainian Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Kiev, attendees revealed the shockingly high abortion rate post-legalization. For a few examples, Dr. E. F. Schinkar found that while illegal abortions fell by about 17%, the total number of abortions rose by 300%; Dr. Tikhanadse found that, by 1924, abortions were half of all births in Leningrad. These numbers triggered an outcry among the audience against “sexual chaos.”
Some historians condemn the politicization of Soviet healthcare. David Hoffman writes that “individual reproductive rights were subordinated to national demographic concerns.” Alain Blum describes it as “ideology over observation.” Anticipating later assessments, Leon Trotsky held abortion to be “one of [women’s] most important civil, political and cultural rights” and denounced “interference in what is to every woman the most intimate sphere of life.” Yet, reproductive health can hardly be apolitical when it involves the induction of new members into the political community. In a 1925 mock trial, one among many held throughout the Soviet Union to educate the public on the regime’s stance on various social issues, the prosecutor asked a woman who had an illegal abortion, “Do you understand . . . that you have killed a future person, a citizen who might have been useful for society?” to which she responded “I thought that my body was my property, that I could do with it what I wanted and that my fetus belonged only to me.”
The Soviet approach is inadvertently “pro-life,” to use a modern American term, due to an emphasis on what historian Eric Naiman calls “the individual body’s ownership by the collective.” The defendant’s response in the mock trial that “my body was my property,” which is implied to be an illegitimate defense, shows how communism seizes not just the means of production but also the means of reproduction. Once a body belongs to the collective, any fruit it produces is to be reaped by the collective: to be given rights and responsibilities as persons. If not murder, abortion is theft.
In 1933, the Soviet Union recorded its first-ever negative population growth since 1921. Modern studies concur with this finding. A 2018 paper shows that between 1926 and 1939, the population of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) alone fell by almost 5 million. Andrei Bubnov, the People’s Commissar for Education for the RSFSR, warned that attendance at nurseries had seen massive declines across the Soviet Union. In the first quarter of 1934, the number of children in preschool institutions fell by 31,000 in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, by 41,000 in Western Siberia, and by almost 42,000 in the mid-Volga region.
Standard explanations for the demographic crisis, such as the famines caused by agricultural collectivization, do not fully account for the insufficient growth in industrialized urban areas where the quality of life had been higher, and where nursuries and maternity wards were more available. Population trends in the cities would have been even more dire had it not for the many peasants who migrated there for work.
Stanislav Strumilin, the premier Soviet statistician who exposed the decline in national birth rates, saw the answer to this dilemma in something resembling demographic transition theory: higher living standards lead to lower fertility. He found that groups with better wages actually had fewer children. White-collar workers with the greatest access to state support for families had the fewest children. Strumilin’s work shattered earlier predictions that women would want bigger families once communism had created a more comfortable life for them. Cracks in said theory were already showing as early as 1927, when the Commissariat for Public Health examined the questionnaires filled out by women seeking abortions. It turned out that the typical abortion seeker was not an indigent woman but one who was materially better off, was either married or in a stable relationship, and had already had children.
One suddenly realized that the chief culprit responsible for undermining family life was not the lingering effects of capitalism or the licentious bourgeoisie, who had long ceased to exist. It was women themselves, especially the pampered urban ladies, who refused to do their share, even as their sisters in the countryside toiled and often gave their lives to building the nation. The Women’s Division of the Communist Party, known for hosting radical feminist administrators like Alexandra Kollontai, was disbanded in 1930. Contraception, legalized in 1923, began to be de facto restricted, as central planners kept its supply artificially low throughout the 1930s.
Abortion, the act that most symbolizes rejection of home and hearth, also fell within the crosshairs. In May 1936, a draft of new family law provisions, including a total ban on abortion, was released for public comment. Pravda, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, praised the changes: “This love of children and this joy of parenthood have been given to men by the Soviet reality. . . . [I]n this real and great country of ours the working people have found the bliss of being free and living a full life.” Since “the exploitation of man by man has been abolished and women have been liberated,” the paper urged readers not to “fall for [the bourgeois] lie about ‘free love.’” More than once the enemies of the people suggested to us the foul and poisonous idea of liquidating the family and disrupting marriage. The bourgeoisie has tried to use it as a weapon in the struggle against socialist progress.” Aaron Soltz, a justice of the Soviet Supreme Court, echoed the Pravda article, saying that in a society without unemployment and want, women have no right to decline the “joys of motherhood.”
Official rhetoric was not without purchase among the masses. The most avid supporters of the abortion ban were peasant women, who employed it as a populist cudgel against their more affluent urban sisters. “We’re not townees: we’re not afraid to give birth,” writes an anonymous farm worker in a letter to Pravda. The implication is that urban women who had abortions were spoiled and fearful of children despite the family-friendly resources at their disposal. Another woman writes, “Our children have a good protector: the proletarian state.” Even with a total ban, abortion seekers “will always find a loophole; they will go from one commission to another and beg,” she warns. While by no means exclusively anti-abortion, in helping the ban come to pass, the sympathies of the rural working class evoke George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles.” And come to pass it did on June 27, 1936, although subsequent interventions by the People’s Commissar for Health, Grigory Kaminsky, added a list of health conditions that qualified for an exemption. The ban would last until 1954, when it was gradually repealed after Stalin’s death the year before.
The reaction against abortion ultimately rested on beliefs about the proper role of women in Soviet society. “Abortions . . . are unacceptable in our country,” Aaron Soltz explained in 1937. “A Soviet woman has the same rights as a man, but this does not exempt her from the great and honourable duty imposed on her by nature: she is a mother; she gives life. And this is assuredly not a personal matter, but a matter of great social importance.” So prevalent were Soltz’s views that even the feminist icon Alexandra Kollontai, who had called for abolishing the family, felt a need to give her own legacy a more moderate spin. She recounted in 1946 that “I always promoted the idea that the woman must have the right to build a new life in the socialist state and to be a citizen with full rights, but never to forget that her second obligation is motherhood.”
Under Stalin in particular, the mother was the very embodiment of the Soviet polity. The concept of the Rodina-mat, or “motherland,” follows an earlier European habit of personifying the nation as a woman but casts her in an explicitly nurturing role. Marianne (France), Britannia (the British Empire), and Columbia (the U.S.) are never depicted alongside children in 19th and early-20th-century political art. They don Phrygian caps, laurels, and Corinthian helmets, and they carry tridents, shields, and constitutions—all items from classical antiquity appropriated by the Enlightenment. While Western nations adopted a pagan aesthetic, styling themselves after childless, ageless, and somewhat war-like goddesses, the Soviet Union took inspiration from Christianity. Just as the Virgin Mary in Eastern Orthodox iconography is posed next to Jesus Christ the Son, the motherland often appears in propaganda with a boy in her bosom. That the atheistic Soviets would tap into Russia’s Christian heritage was no surprise. A thousand years of history could not be overcome in less than two decades.
The mother-and-child imagery became especially salient during the Second World War, when the Soviet Union faced invasion from Nazi Germany. The 1943 poster “For the Motherland!” shows a woman with a small child in one hand and a banner in the other; beneath her stand five soldiers with their guns pointed westward, presumably towards the incoming enemy. Another poster from the same year asks the Red Army to save a woman who clasps her son tightly as she confronts a blood-stained bayonet with a swastika on its hilt. The message: the mother and child must be defended at all costs. To further inculcate the significance of the duo, Stalin established the Order of Mother Heroine in 1944. Retained by Russia and Belarus to this day, the award was offered to women who have had at least seven children.
The fact that the Soviet Union held onto feminine personification at all, and a maternal one at that, is itself extraordinary. By the 1940s, Western countries had been moving away from casting women as national symbols. Gone were the days of “Columbia Calls,” a First World War poster in which a white-clad woman waving the Stars and Stripes implores the viewer to enlist. Women were now shown working in factories, fields, or the army reserve, wearing clothes that were practical for the occasion. In other words, they had evolved from objects of inspiration and protection to full participants in the war effort. Although similar archetypes had existed in Soviet art as early as 1918 during which women were called to take up arms for the Bolshevik cause, and they persisted during the industrial campaigns of the 1930s and beyond, the revival of national personification in the form of the motherland was the last stand of a dying tradition in a world radically transformed by the late war.
Stalin’s 1936 abortion ban has often been cited, most notably by his arch-rival Leon Trotsky, as a reversal of earlier commitments to women’s rights and a betrayal of true communism. But overwhelming evidence suggests this was intended from the outset. Did the November 1920 decree that legalized abortion not call on the state to “combat” abortion at the same time? Did Trotsky himself not admit that it was impossible to abolish the family? Was the point of communism not to create a better life for women so they would not have to resort to abortions? If so, why should elective abortions not be banned after a certain time, especially when it was determined that women had been sufficiently prosperous? Why should a “liberated” woman, however one defines it, no longer be expected to have children?
That last question leads to an important observation. As long as women are expected to have children—that is, as long as motherhood is normative—abortion will forever remain suspect even if it is blessed at the moment by legal fiat. When a norm becomes strong enough, the law will respond accordingly. The risk of an abortion ban is ever present in a society that prioritizes motherhood. Communism tried to “abolish” the family but took for granted the desirability of motherhood. With this norm left intact, the state’s assumption of the family’s child-rearing functions could not but lend further justification to ending elective abortion and other contraceptive methods.
In characterizing the Soviet Union as an example of a failed sexual revolution, modern progressivism betrays its most ambitious design yet: a true abolition of the family, and not merely its replacement by the state, through the abolition of motherhood. If women are to be freed from the family, why not do away with that which gives rise to a family in the first place? Once the revolution is complete, motherhood may persist, but only as a private choice stripped of any normative power. The aspiration, if not reality, of the new order is spelled out by one pro-abortion columnist writing for The Huffington Post: “It’s never been easier, medically speaking, for a woman to choose not to have kids. Once motherhood was something close to a biological inevitability for a woman who had sex with men; now it’s an option.”
To reduce motherhood to a choice requires society to abandon any legitimate interest in regulating fetal health and safety in the womb when the mother wills otherwise. This view of the right to privacy was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in no less a case than Roe v. Wade, leading to the imposition of a trimester-based gestational limit. For all its excesses, Stalin’s Soviet Union at least knew it had to protect unborn lives, if only because they were workers and soldiers in waiting, and that the “great social importance” of motherhood warranted state intervention in reproductive health. As conservative author Bettina di Fiore admits, “The abortion-on-demand-at-any-gestational-age situation that currently exists in the U.S. never existed in the USSR.”
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