Marx or Malthus? Population debates and the reproductive politics of state-socialist Poland in the 1950s and 1960s

ABSTRACT

The article presents state-socialist and Catholic reproductive and population politics of Cold War Poland, focusing on competing discourses of population growth that were present in public debates since the 1950s up to the 1970s. Situating the local Polish case in a wider international framework, I examine references to Malthusian and Marxists theories of population in the statements of party-state and Catholic journalists during the only period of (moderate) anti-natalism in the history of state-socialist Poland. I argue that by ignoring the more moderate Catholic population and reproductive politics rationales, party-state journalists attempted to position Church leaders and commentators as unanimous supporters of ‘unfettered fertility’ and to present the party state as the only modernizing force whose population and reproductive politics would guarantee Polish citizens’ prosperous standards of living attained thanks to small-sized families rearing high-quality children. In the official rhetoric this model of the modern family was to be achieved thanks to contraceptives that were endorsed by the party state supporting a ‘conscious motherhood’ campaign initiated in the late 1950s by the Polish family planning association.

KEYWORDS:

• Poland
• state socialism
• population debate
• abortion
• family planning
• Malthusianism
• Catholic Church

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Agata Ignaciuk, Natalia Jarska, Eszter Varsa and two anonymous reviewers of the History of the Family for their helpful comments on the earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. AAN.