In the Name of Helping Women: Women Against the Family Policy of the Slovak State1

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fuelled by nationalism and Catholicism, the wartime Slovak state, a client state of Nazi Germany, aimed to promote population growth by forcing the return of women from public to private life and supporting Slovak Christian families, but also by stigmatizing and restricting any sexuality that was not reproductive. Under these circumstances, where women were shamed for not having enough children, all previously permitted methods of birth control were banned, and abortion was criminalized. One of the few remaining options for controlling one’s fertility was a clandestine abortion. By examining files that document the criminal persecution of women who underwent abortions, this work aims to track alternative family planning practices, and thus the development of a loosely organized clandestine abortion network. It then examines the possibility of understanding abortion as a form of women’s opposition to political and ideological aims to hinder their freedom of choice. At the same time, the article suggests that women’s agency of this kind challenged the patriotic imperative to become a mother as well as the hegemonic narrative and idyllic picture of Slovak motherhood.