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Abstract
SummaryThis article examines popular medical discourses on contraception produced in state-socialist Poland following the legalisation of abortion in 1956, a time when the party state declared family planning to be a public health project. By analysing popular medical literature, I argue that the popularisation of family planning constructed and relied on gender norms that could ease anxieties about the mainstreaming of ideas relating to sexuality and contraception, as well as about gender equality in a state-socialist context. I show that the femininity constructed in Polish birth control advice was based in fertility and the physical attractiveness required to maintain a husband’s sexual interest. Although masculinity was represented as distant, egoistic and violent, experts broadcast mixed messages about the effectiveness and usefulness of popular male contraceptive methods, some of which were at times utterly demonised.
Highlights
The contraception advice literature published in Poland between the legalisation of abortion in 1956 and the mid-1980s exhibits the gendered tensions, contradictions and hierarchies involved in constructing family planning as a legitimate medical and social activity
Polish authors strategically employed arguments relating to the health and prosperity of the entire family, tactically attempting to subdue social anxieties relating to public intervention in birth control practices, previously the almost exclusive domain of the Catholic Church
At the same time as this change was taking place, family planning literature produced by Catholic doctors was elevated to ‘official’ status and mainstreamed through the PZWL
Summary
This article examines popular medical discourses on contraception produced in statesocialist Poland following the legalisation of abortion in 1956, a time when the party state declared family planning to be a public health project. This article builds upon and expands the emerging scholarship on the social and cultural history of reproductive health, medicine and activism in state-socialist Poland. Most of this literature has focused on analysis of the background, introduction and consequences of the 1956 abortion law.. Koscianska has examined the delivery of expert advice during the 1970s, focusing on the consolidation of sexology as a field of scientific enquiry and social intervention.8 These contributions, have, left the changing policies and discourses on family planning and contraception largely unexplored.
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