Public Health Concerns Regarding Reproduction Structured by Race/ Ethnicity and Class during State Socialism in Hungary

Abstract

This paper describes the means by which medical professionals of the socialist period integrated interwar public hygiene practices into the health management of gypsies from the perspective of the public health interest of the majority. In these practices, ethnic/racial stereotypes shaped public health action. Public-health officials justified these actions on the basis of their fear that gypsies would spread diseases if their hygiene issues were not controlled. A further development occurred in the discourse when gypsy ethnic identity came to be recognized as an important statistical variable in determining healthy birth rates. Regarding this question, it will be demonstrated that ethnic identity as a variable, appeared in the medical discourse as a problem that offset the overall reproductive statistics of the state. It is argued that the medical professional discourse with its arguments, practices, and measures, point towards a continuity between the interwar and socialist periods' public health regarding racial thinking.

Work, marriage and premature birth: the socio-medicalisation of pregnancy in state socialist East-Central Europe

“…32 Focusing on racialised aspects of medical discourses, Barna Szamosi viewed a continuity between pre-war and socialist times, as experts noted much higher rates of preterm births among the Roma minority. 33 However, as Anna Borgos has shown, in the early 1960s Roma started to be identified in terms of their participation in the socialist workforce rather than their ethnic background. 34 Methods and sources Methodologically, we use the sociology of expertise 35 and time-sequencing approaches 36 to analyse our expert-produced data.…”