Popular Medical Discourses on Birth Control in the Soviet Union during the Cold War: Shifting Responsibilities and Relational Values

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In the mid-1950s, when the first medical tests of the pill started in the West, abortion was re-legalised in the Soviet Union. Although at first glance these seem to be unrelated, in the subsequent decade the confrontation of “abortion versus the pill” created probably one of the most significant disputes in the national population policies on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. This chapter zooms in on Soviet stances on birth control by addressing the evolution of popular medical discourses surrounding the medicalisation of birth control during the Cold War. Drawing on a Foucauldian analysis of biopower, we illuminate how responsibilities concerning birth control were assigned to and shifted between medical practitioners and ‘ordinary’ men and women from 1955 to 1975. The analysis is based on nearly one hundred articles published in the popular Soviet health magazine “Zdorovie” (in English “Health”), which was the only available periodical source containing professional advice on birth control methods until the 1980s. The main argument arising from this study is that after having re-legalised abortion (1955), the Soviet state sought a means to regulate fertility that would not have as negative an impact on fertility rates as the then increasing abortion rates were believed to have. This effort led to doctors being made the main gatekeepers of birth control during an unofficial anti-abortion campaign in the 1950s, and encouraging natural methods of birth control as part of spousal cooperation in the 1960s. At the same time, birth control in the Soviet Union had to be as effective as the US birth control pill, especially after the pill was introduced in 1960 in the West, and easily controllable by the state, as eventually intrauterine devices (IUDs) appeared to be in the 1970s in the Soviet Union. Like abortion, IUDs allowed doctors to easily supervise women, which would not be possible with the birth control pill. We suggest that relational values around birth control emerging on the two sides of the Iron curtain informed this Soviet biopolitical struggle. In contrast to the verbalised “Kitchen Debate”, it was a latent yet apparant hegemonic struggle in the private sphere of everyday life, the roots of which can be traced back to the Cold War.