Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture

Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics

in English, 348 pages,
Vanderbilt University Press, June 15, 2024
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As the predominant form of birth control in Soviet society, abortion reflected key paradoxes of state socialism: women held formal equality but lacked basic needs such as contraceptives. With market reforms, Russians enjoyed new access to Western contraceptives and new pressures to postpone childbearing until economically self-sufficient. But habits of family planning did not emerge automatically—they required extensive physician retraining, public education, and cultural transformation.

In Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture, author Michele Rivkin-Fish examines the creative strategies of Russians who promoted family planning in place of routine abortion. Rather than emphasizing individual rights, they explained family planning’s benefits to the nation—its potential to strengthen families and prevent the secondary sterility that resulted when women underwent repeat, poor-quality abortions. Still, fierce debates about abortion and contraceptives erupted as declining fertility was framed as threatening Russia’s demographic sovereignty.