Abortion policy and practice in Greece

Abstract

Despite its illegality until recently, abortion is estimated to have been responsible for almost half of the sharp postwar decline in the Greek birth rate. This article examines abortion as a part of a Greek contraceptive culture which has taken shape during the postwar period both in response, and in resistance to, a variety of macro- and micropolitical institutions and forces. During much of this period, pronatalist policies and discourses of both state and church combined to foreclose most medical contraceptive alternatives. In contrast, illegal abortion was a relatively safe, medicalized procedure widely practiced by doctors. Even after being legalized in 1980, female medical contraceptive methods continue to be rejected by the great majority of Greek women, and abortion and male methods of birth control remain the principal means of controlling fertility. The article focuses on the specific abortion practices and meanings of three generations of married women living in the city of Rhodes, capital of the Dodecanese Province of Greece's Eastern Aegean, and explores the ways in which they have been shaped by, and reflect, local cultural understandings of the body, health, sexuality, morality, motherhood and childhood, as well as micropolitical relations within the family.