CREES Noon Lecture. A Global Perspective on Campaigns for Reproductive Rights: Insights from Soviet and Contemporary Russia

The first ever public campaign to defend access to legal abortion in Russia took place in 2011. Notably, Russian advocates avoided common feminist slogans claiming reproductive “rights” and “choice.” Instead, they implored the state to “Fight Abortion, Not Women.” This slogan expressed opposition to the routine use of abortion for fertility control and implicitly demanded state support for contraceptives. In this presentation, Rivkin-Fish traces the historical conditions that made “Fight Abortion, Not Women” a salient message for the health professionals who established Russia’s first state and non-governmental organizations for family planning. Their efforts illustrate a broader vision of change at socialism’s end—one aimed not at promoting individual autonomy but at rationalizing and re-enchanting relationships.
She will show how, by promoting this culturally tailored approach to liberal biopolitics, family planning experts facilitated dramatic transformations in reproductive health services and reproductive practices. Nonetheless, their programs became targets for nationalists’ ire and demographic anxiety. By tracing the rise and demise of family planning institutions, Rivkin-Fish’s Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture (2024) reveals the centrality of reproductive and demographic politics to Russia’s nationalist and authoritarian turn.

Michele Rivkin-Fish is Professor of Anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on reproductive politics and health in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. She is the author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (2005), which won the Basker Prize for Outstanding Research on Gender and Health from the Society of Medical Anthropology, and the Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Her most recent book, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics (2024), examines professional efforts to replace routine abortion use with contraceptive habits as a lens onto the evolving practices of liberal biopolitics from the late Soviet 1950s to 2016 in Russia.

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at marinjd@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.