Reproductive Mobilizations and Interventions in State Socialist and Early Democratic Poland, 1950s-1990s

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel discusses various mobilizations and interventions around reproductive issues in Poland since the 1950s until the 1990s, focusing mostly on abortion, menstruation, and pregnancy. We examine different actors engaged in enacting reproductive change such as feminists, medical experts, or clergy, and study both transnational aspects of reproductive mobilizations as well as domestic traditions in which they were grounded. Natalia Jarska’s paper looks at the early decades of communism, analyzing the connection between women’s reproductive health and their role of socialist workers, while Małgorztaa Fidelis and Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska focus on the period around 1989 when the anti-abortion legislation mobilized its supporters and opponents who debated such issues as definitions of democracy or the role of Poland in global reproductive movements.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas, Institute of History CAS (Czech Republic)

Papers

• 'There Is No Solidarity without Women’s Freedom': Defending Reproductive Rights in Poland around 1989 - Malgorzata Fidelis, U of Illinois at Chicago

• Gynecologists and Women Workers’ (Reproductive) Health in Post-War Poland, 1950s-1960s - Natalia Jarska, Institute of History, PAS (Poland)

• Going Global?: Polish 'Right to Life' and the International Anti-Abortion Movement at the Turn of the 1990s - Sylwia Kuzma-Markowska, U of Warsaw (Poland)

Discussant

• Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, Jagiellonian U (Poland)