Compulsory Motherhood: The 1936 Abortion Law

Abstract

While the majority of women were now expected to pull their weight in the sphere of production, this did not relieve them of their reproductive duty. Yet in the early years of Soviet power they had been sorely under-performing in this area. The legalisation of abortion had not helped, and by the late 1920s the number of abortions exceeded the number of live births in some urban areas.¹ In the first years of the Stalin era concern about the high incidence of abortion led to an increase in information about contraception; both Rabotnitsa and Krest’yanka offered readers advice on the subject,² as well as carrying advertisements for contraceptive creams and gelatin caps.³ By the mid-1930s, however, the state was no longer concerned with helping women find better ways of avoiding children, but on convincing them that the more they had, the better.⁴ On 27 June 1936, what was colloquially referred to as ‘the law of happy motherhood’ [Zakon schastlivogo materinstva]⁵ was introduced, making abortion illegal unless the pregnancy threatened the woman’s life or health.⁶ That the principal reason for this was to boost the birth rate was rarely acknowledged in the women’s press. One article published in Rabotnitsa in 1935, the first to moot the possibility of a future ban on abortion, did point out that ‘the country needs people’.⁷ However, when the law was actually introduced, readers were told that the intention was to protect women’s physical and mental health.