Family Planning Advice in State-Socialist Poland, 1950s–80s: Local and Transnational Exchanges

Abstract

This paper scrutinises the relations between different models of family planning advice and their evolution in Poland between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, focusing on their similarities and dissimilarities, conflicts and concordances. From 1956 onwards, the delivery of family planning advice became a priority for both the Polish Catholic Church and the party-state, especially its health authorities, which supported the foundation of the Society of Conscious Motherhood and aspired to mainstream birth control advice through the network of public well-woman clinics. As a consequence, two systems of family planning counselling emerged: the professional, secular family planning movement and Catholic pre-marital and marital counselling. We argue that reciprocal influence and emulation existed between state-sponsored and Catholic family planning in state-socialist Poland, and that both models used transnational organisations and debates relating to contraception for their construction and legitimisation. By evaluating the extent to which the strategies and practices for the delivery of birth control advice utilised by transnational birth control movements were employed in a ‘second world’ context such as Poland, we reveal unexpected supranational links that complicate and problematise historiographical and popular understandings of the Iron Curtain and Cold War Europe.

Anti‐abortion Activism in Poland and the Republic of Ireland c.1970s–1990s*

“…56 In 1981, for example, a Polish Catholic periodical Z pomocą rodzinie (With Help to the Family) published an interview with the female gynaecologist Jolanta Massalska, who had been fired in the late 1950s from a Warsaw hospital because she had openly opposed the abortion law, and who in subsequent decades had become involved in Catholic natural family planning efforts. 57 Massalska firmly stated that women terminating pregnancies until the third month "do not treat the removal of the foetus as killing a human being" in spite of "the progress of the medicine showing that abortion is not a removal of some shapeless jelly." 58 Massalska's views were repeated by many authors at the turn of the 1990s, who stressed that "the life starts with conception" and that "empirical sciences prove that the conceived child is a human being."…”

‘New eugenics,’ gender and sexuality: a global perspective on reproductive politics and sex education in Cold War Europe

“…Analysis has furthermore explored ways in which the politics of state socialist countries was on par with international developments or at times even 'more progressive' than that of their Western European neighbors (Kościańska, 2021;Lišková, 2018). Like in other fields of social historical research concerning the Cold War, the exchange and transfer of ideas, practices and experts across the Iron Curtain has by now become a rich field of study in relation to fertility, birth control and contraceptives (Doboş, 2018a(Doboş, , 2018bIgnaciuk, 2014Ignaciuk, , 2019Kuźma-Markowska & Ignaciuk, 2020;Lišková, 2016Lišková, , 2018.…”

“…These studies have underlined the tensions between the ideology of women's emancipation and the realities of women's so-called double burden in state socialist countries, especially from the mid-1960s onwards (Ignaciuk, 2019;Lišková, 2018;Randall, 2011). They have pointed to how in different local contexts, different meanings of masculinity and femininity, as defined by both state and church representatives, have not only shaped reproductive discourses but also influenced birth control and contraceptive practices (Gembries et al, 2018;Hilevych, 2015;Hilevych & Rusterholz, 2018;Ignaciuk, 2019;Kuźma-Markowska & Ignaciuk, 2020;Lišková, 2018). Hašková and Dudová (2020) in this special issue underline the gendered nature of reproductive politics that mostly targeted women's bodies in relation to fertility rates, birth control and family planning.…”

“…As the latest studies reveal, there were, however, a 'spectrum of Christian responses' to the social changes of the 1960s in the field of sexuality and reproductive matters (Harris, 2018, p. 13). Concerning the state socialist countries, the role of the Catholic Church has already been reexamined in some detail (Heimann & Szegedi, 2018;Jarska, 2019;Kościańska, 2018;Kuhar 2015;Kuźma-Markowska & Ignaciuk, 2020). Two issues, namely responses to the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae on the regulation of birth and the liberalization of abortion in the mid-1950s have mostly been studied in the Polish, Czechoslovakian and Hungarian contexts.…”

“…They have also underlined that these actors engaged in mutual interaction, used each other's arguments to their own advantage as well as influenced each other's positions (Heimann & Szegedi, 2018;Jarska, 2019). Not only the state but also the Church had its own institutions of premarital and marital counseling, and both were engaged in transnational organizations and debates in legitimizing their arguments (Kościańska, 2018;Kuźma-Markowska & Ignaciuk, 2020). Far from representing a homogenous picture, representatives of the Catholic Church and people of Catholic faith showed multifaced reactions to changing social realities, including those set by the altering political contexts of state socialism.…”