‘For Girls it is an Honor …’: Women, Work, and Abortion in Communist Hungary, 1948–56

Abstract

Concerned with a falling birth rate in the early 1950s, the Hungarian communist regime banned abortion and encouraged motherhood. A closer inquiry into the 1953 abortion ban and the broader cultural context of crime and policing in early communist Hungary suggests that repression alone was inadequate, as an underground abortion network provided some respite for women seeking to control their reproduction. However, the regime’s pronatalist policy aligned well with the interests and biases of skilled male workers: redirecting women’s efforts from productive to reproductive labor both removed them as competitors at work and returned them to their “proper”, subordinate place. Internal Party documents and interviews with refugees and émigrés conducted before and after 1956 reveal that although women exerted some control over their reproduction throughout the entire period, they were thwarted as much by men’s resistance to working women as by the regime’s intrusive pronatalist policy.