Reproductive Ideologies: Education for Parenthood

Abstract

Each one of us can be substituted in our job by someone else. However, to a child, there is no substitute for a mother. Giving birth and bringing up children will therefore always remain the main mission of a woman. (Sipr, 1981, pp. 39-40)

Education for parenthood is certainly not a one-time action; it is not a mere instruction about the sex life of a man and a woman, and it is not interchangeable with sex education. It is, above all, an essential and inseparable part of the whole education of an allround developed person, a truly harmonious personality. ... Education for parenthood which is truly creative is above all a moral matter. It represents an attitude towards the world and life, which does not place my own ‘I’ in the first place. (Figer, 1981, pp. 116-17)

We noted in the previous chapter that ‘education for parenthood’ is regarded in Czechoslovakia as an integral part of the pro-natalist population policy. For this reason, the system of ‘education for parenthood’ is much broader in scope, more specialised, more self-conscious and much more systematic than any comparable programme in a Western capitalist country. A variety of pro-natalist ideologies, making child-bearing seem ‘natural’ and thus obligatory, also exists in the West (see Busfield, 1974; Macintyre, 1976; and Veevers, 1980), but they tend to be much less explicit and systematic than in Eastern Europe. Unlike women in the GDR, women in the West today are not continuously urged ‘to marry and fulfil their national responsibility by bearing children’. In the past, of course, this sort of exhortation has emerged elsewhere in the context of ideologies of eugenism and ‘race suicide’.¹ Moreover, given their political pluralism, Western liberal democracies are characterised by the coexistence of contradictory ideologies. Notions such as ‘children make life meaningful’ or ‘motherhood constitutes the fulfilment of womanhood’ exist concurrently with ideologies exposing the advan-tages of a‘child-free lifestyle’. Such diversity is not tolerated in Eastern Europe, though this is not to argue that there is uniformity of opinion among specialists as to the importance of parenthood for one’s mental health.