“The terrible burden of being a woman”: Childbirth and abortion in the late USSR through the prism of Leningrad feminists’ underground publications (1979-1982)

Abstract

The present article offers an analysis of the problem of women being mistreated during childbirth and abortion in the late Soviet Union based on the material of the samizdat and tamizdat publications by the Leningrad independent women’s movement. The underground feminists were the first to bring to light the persisting, but taboo problem of the physical suffering, humiliation and indifference women had to face at the Soviet maternity hospitals and abortion clinics. Breaking of this taboo among others resulted in their persecution by the KGB, exile, and imprisonment of several of the group members. However, the same problems were openly revealed and acknowledged by the Soviet authorities only ten years later, in the era of glasnost. This paper examines the main issues raised in the Leningrad feminists’ publications by situating them in a broader political and discursive context of the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Finally, it offers several insights into the factors that may have contributed to the persistence of the problem of women’s mistreatment within the healthcare system in the USSR despite the official claims about the continuous improvement of Soviet women’s and children’s conditions.