Unmaking Russia's Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics

Описание: Health Matters, A Virtual Lecture Series on Medicine, Illness, and Public Health

On February 10th, 2025, Michele Rivkin-Fish joined us for the second lecture of this new Jordan Center series devoted to the interdisciplinary study of medicine, illness, and public health. Health Matters explores the multiple dimensions of medicine and health at play in the pre-Petrine, Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet contexts: as a site of state policy, demographic concerns, body politics, surveillance, expertise, biopower, and healing cultures, as well as the experiences of disease, illness, and disability and their representations in art, literature, and media. We hope that Health Matters will enhance exchanges between scholars from such diverse fields as anthropology, history, medical humanities, politics, public health, and sociology, and facilitate attention to such matters in our teaching and research.

Abortion was the most common form of birth control in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, a situation that reflected key paradoxes of state socialism: women held formal equality but lacked basic needs such as contraceptives. When the country entered the global economy, Russian medical experts made connections with Western pharmaceutical firms and the reproductive rights movement, launching a contraceptive revolution. This presentation examines their processes of establishing a family planning infrastructure and striving to legitimize habitual contraceptive use in the 1990s, a time when Russian conservatives declared a national demographic crisis based on low fertility. While Russian family planning experts devised culturally salient approaches for liberalizing reproductive practices and succeeded in dramatically lowering abortion use, the Russian Church and conservative activists made them into key targets of anti-Western politics. Family planning services were quickly defunded, abortion has become increasingly restricted, and numerous governmental policies aim to increase fertility without considering women’s health or interests. This book talk traces the rise and demise of family planning institutions between the late 1980s and 2016 to illuminate the centrality of gendered, demographic politics in the struggle for Russia’s socio-political future.

Michele Rivkin-Fish is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research interests include medical anthropology, moral economies of medicine and health, gender and health, reproductive politics, Soviet Russia & post-Soviet Russia. Her work has examined Russia’s health care reforms, debates and policies on reproduction and demography, sex education, and the daily struggles of women and men to secure well-being among privatization and nationalism.