Monday, January 10, 2011

Soviets Against Abortion!

Super cool Soviet poster from 1925, warning against midwives performing abortions.



Abortions performed by either trained or self-taught midwives not only maim the woman, they also often lead to death.

7 comments:

christopher said...

You've got to post more often, you seemed have almost halted about the point I started following a year or so ago! To this post though, I can't imagine that it was a poster actually advocating against abortion was it? Probably more towards non-professionals doing it?

The Dutchman said...

Thanx for your kind words.

Abortion was made legal in the Soviet Union in 1920 and then re-criminalized after Stalin consolidated power. When I made the post, I thought it had been made illegal earlier, but it actually wasn't until 1936 when the Central Executive Committee of the USSR issued a decree that prohibited abortions, while increasing financial help to mothers, families with multiple children, expanding the availability of obstetrical services and childcare facilities, more strictly enforcing child support obligations, and providing for minor changes in the divorce law. Abortion was allowed only in exceptional cases, such as a severe threat to a woman’s life or health, or upon indication of debilitating hereditary diseases of the parents.

After Stalin’s death, the prosecution of women for abortions was stopped on August 5, 1954. On November 23, 1955, the ban on abortion was lifted, and abortions were allowed on request if performed in a medical institution.

For the record, Lenin and Trotsky were the pro-aborts, Stalin was against it.

christopher said...

Thanks, that's interesting and something I had frankly been ignorant of. But why was Stalin so interested in it; to ensure repopulation after his purges (the ones that had ocurred/were still ocurring/would be ocurring)?

The Dutchman said...

Stalin was an ex-seminarian and, no matter how far left he was on economics, he was actually rather conservative on social matters. His taste in art and architecture was very traditional, he was rather prudish about family maters, he routinely criticized Shostakovich's "modernism." We even find this in his theoretical writings, where he adapts the Aristotelian categories he learned in seminary to Marxism.

christopher said...

I know a bit about Stalin and his time at the seminary and I'm not sure if I can buy into his experience there being a contributing factor in that, leaving me still wondering what the motive was behind that small bit of chosen morality. I tend to think his "conservatism" just happened to be coincidental to his need to stop any and all dissent. - Thanks for the conversation, I don't find many people interested in or willing to discuss history, let alone Stalin (one of those vague names from the past that kids ocassionally hear something or other about...)

The Dutchman said...

I think it's pretty well accepted that Stalin was a social conservative. While Lenin was cosmopolitan and university educated, as were his urban associates Kaminev, Zinoviev, Trotsky, and Krupskya, the circles around Stalin were usually provincial and poorly educated. With the death of Lenin, cosmopolitans like Emma Goldman found themselves unwelcome and dreamers like Bukharin were replaced by hard-nosed commissars like Kaganovich, Ordzhonikidze, and Mikoyan, all of whom had fairly old fashioned views of sexual morality.

As if to prove this pattern, Stalin usually chose sexual deviants to head up the secret police, probably so they could be denounced at his pleasure for indulging in "bourgeois sexual excess." Yagoda was a compulsive gambler and womanizer, Yezhov was bisexual, and Beria was a serial rapist.

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