The Winners of Socialism: Fighting Infertility in Pronatalist Romania

Abstract

Drawing from interviews and life histories, I consider the singular reproductive trajectories of women who fought infertility during the enforced pronatalist policies of the late communist era in Romania. I aim to explore the role of fine-grained ethnography in revealing both the localized mechanisms of reproductive governance and the diverse subjectivities produced by citizens’ encounters with biopower. I argue that, through an analysis of these ethnographic cases, we can further conceptualize reproductive vulnerability as an intersubjective notion. In addition, women’s atypical stories give us a glimpse into the typical workings of the recording and reporting practices of the pronatalist regime.