The socialist state run modernization produced low fertility throughout Eastern Europe. Fertility rates started falling soon after the end of the Second World War quickly reaching below replacement levels in many areas. This article examines the state responses to the falling fertility as well as birth control practices that individuals relied on in order to maintain small families. After outlining some common features of population policies under the state socialism, the article focuses on family planning policies in Yugoslavia. It is argued that liberal population policy and uninterrupted liberal abortion legislation in Yugoslavia, resulted, among other reasons, from the communist leadership's commitment to national and gender equality, respectively. It is further argued that gender hierarchy within the marriage and family remained almost untouched by the socialist project of women's emancipation and that these hierarchical gender relations shaped birth control practices in specific ways.
This article argues that nationalism has connected religion with secular politics in Serbia but that their rapprochement has been a gradual process. In order to demonstrate the transition from a limited influence of religion on politics to a much tighter relationship between the two, this article discusses the abortion legislation reform and the introduction of religious education in public schools, respectively. It argues that, while illustrative of different types of connection between religion and politics, these two issues had similar implications for gender equality-they produced discourses that recreated and justified patriarchal social norms. After religion gained access to public institutions, its (patriarchal) discourses on gender were considerably empowered. The article points to some tangible evidence of a re-traditionalisation and re-patriarchalisation of gender roles within the domestic realm in Serbia.
In this article the author challenges several dominant positions that are relevant for understanding demographic trends and contraceptive practices as well as their mutual relationship. First, the author rejects the assumed direct connection between high abortion rates and low fertility. Second, the author challenges the thesis according to which abortions come about because of the lack of contraception and proposes that high abortion rates result from failing contraception i.e. from high failing rates of coitus interruptus which is a preferred method of birth control by men and women in Serbia. Finally, the author argues that giving control over reproductive risk to men does not make women passive victims of male domination. Rather women are, it is argued, active agents in reproducing hegemonic gender roles and relations. In addition, the author shows how gender power relations formed at the micro level may be consequential for macro level politics
This paper traces changes in the dominant paradigm of Serbian demography that took palace in the context of major socio-political changes during the late twentieth century. The changes are traced both in the realm of research and social policy. It is argued that demographic transition theory remained the main explanatory model but that its modified version which gives precedence to ideational vs. structural variables gained the dominant status. In the realm of social policy the ideology of family planning was replaced by population policy ideology. It is further argued that alarming discourses and sharp rhetoric about population problems did not result in formulation of a system of specific measures of population policy. Thus, the author claims, demographic discourses that at the time saturated public spaces were constitutive for - gender and national -identity politics and not inconsequential for social policy
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