Unwanted Children in Czechoslovakia and Beyond

• In Event: Falling by the Wayside: Expertise on Unwanted Children, Youth Criminals, and Sadistic Women in Socialist Czechoslovakia and Poland

Abstract

Psychological approaches influenced expertise on childhood development and parenting in East-Central Europe at least since the late 1950s. Chief among them was a perspective warning against the adverse effects of maternal deprivation. Inspired by research conducted by John Bowlby under the auspices of the World Health Organization (1951), which showed problematic development of children who were deprived of mother’s care, experts in various countries of East-Central Europe applied the emotional deprivation angle to explore children’s development.
This paper will:
1. focus on unique longitudinal research on children born 1961-63 to Prague mothers who were refused abortion. The procedure was legal upon an abortion commission’s approval since 1958 and, authors of this study, psychologists Zdeněk Matějček and Zdeněk Dytrych, took it that mothers who were denied and had to bring their pregnancy to term did in fact not want to have these children. What effects will this maternal rejection have on the lives of these kids?, the psychologists wondered. They followed them up in regular intervals until these “children” were 35 years old. At every step, they compared their development to the control group pair-matched for age, socio-economic status and the father’s presence at home. After decades-long research, the psychologists concluded that the results were in disfavor to the children born unwanted.
2. situate this Czechoslovak research in networks of transnational knowledge circulation, focusing on international inspirations and connections as well as on similarities and differences with Bowlby-inspired research in other East-Central European countries.
The aim of this paper is to account for the influence psychology wielded in socialist East-Central Europe and to argue for the connectedness of socialist expertise to its counterparts within the socialist bloc and beyond.

Author

• Katerina Liskova, Institute of History CAS (Czech Republic)