The Winners of Socialism: Fighting Infertility in Pronatalist Romania

ABSTRACT

Drawing from interviews and life histories, I consider the singular reproductive trajectories of women who fought infertility during the enforced pronatalist policies of the late communist era in Romania. I aim to explore the role of fine-grained ethnography in revealing both the localized mechanisms of reproductive governance and the diverse subjectivities produced by citizens’ encounters with biopower. I argue that, through an analysis of these ethnographic cases, we can further conceptualize reproductive vulnerability as an intersubjective notion. In addition, women’s atypical stories give us a glimpse into the typical workings of the recording and reporting practices of the pronatalist regime.

Video abstract

Read the transcript

Watch the video on Vimeo

KEYWORDS:

• Romania
• ethnographic case
• infertility
• pronatalism
• reproductive governance
• reproductive vulnerability

Acknowledgments

My gratitude goes to Adeline Masquelier, Marcia Inhorn, Alison Truitt, Jason Nesbitt, and Kelly Lewis, as well as to Lenore Manderson and three anonymous reviewers for feedback and editing suggestions related to this article. I would also like to thank Janelle Taylor and the participants to the 2017 Cascadia Seminar at Western Washington University for their comments on an early draft of the article. The research on which the article is based was approved by Tulane University IRB.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. The expression “fighting infertility” has been commonly used in social science scholarship in reference to assisted reproductive technologies (ART). With its first IVF clinic opened only in 1995, Romania was “one of the latecomers to IVF in Europe” (Nahman 2016). Thus, in the context of late Socialism discussed in this article, “fighting infertility” refers more narrowly to infertile women’s experiences with conventional medical treatments, such as hormone therapy or artificial insemination.

2. In the 1960s, other Eastern European communist countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia) attempted to implement pronatalist policies to stimulate population growth. However, in these countries, as well as later in the Soviet Union, women’s reproductive rights were constantly subject to negotiation. Eventually, the authorities gradually relaxed the pronatalist regimes and granted women access to domestic or imported contraception during the 1970s and 1980s (David 1999). Unlike its neighbors, Romania continued to pursue “a rigidly enforced pronatalist policy, banning the importation of contraceptives, strictly prohibiting most abortions, and imposing a tax on childless couples” (Băban 1999:191).

3. This number might be higher because women who died before reaching the hospital after an incomplete abortion remained most likely unreported (Kligman 1998:208–211).

4. Again, these statistics provide only a relative number of clandestine abortions. Memory failure and attempts to conceal the real number of abortions could have impacted the accuracy of these numbers. Eight women in my research cohort claimed of having had 2 abortions each, 2 had 3 abortions each, 5 had 5 abortions each, and 2 had more than 10 but less than 20 abortions each, while another 2 had 20 or more. Another one claimed of having had 30 abortions, and it is safe to assume that she actually had at least half the number of abortions she claimed (c.f. Kligman 1998, chapter 6; Băban 1999:200).

5. The cost of an illegal abortion varied between 3000 and 5000 lei (Kligman 1998; Iepan 2005) which means, at the 1970s exchange rate of 4.47 lei for $1, that during the 1970s, the cost of a clandestine abortion was between $671 and $1118. During the 1980s, the exchange rate was 11.19 lei for $1, which sets the cost of an illicit abortion between $268 and $446. http://intl.econ.cuhk.edu.hk/exchange_rate_regime/index.php?cid=27.

6. Only communist Bulgaria had a similar regulation (Doboș 2010).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Paul and Elizabeth Selley fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Cristina A. Pop

Cristina A. Pop is a medical anthropologist whose research interests are the liberalization of medical care and its impact on women’s health and well-being. Dr. Pop’s geographical area of expertise is Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on Romania. She is currently working on a book manuscript about the cervical cancer “epidemic” in Romania.