World War II obliterated the population of the Soviet Union — around 27 million Soviet citizens were lost at the hands of the war. Women were left with the grave responsibility to rebuild civic society and produce the next labor force, in spite of the reality that the postwar sex ratio in 1944 in rural areas was 28 men per 100 women. In Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union, Mie Nakachi puts forth an argument about how the Soviet state bent family and abortion policies to serve the state’s interests of restoring population numbers to contribute to the communist effort.

In 1920, the Soviet Union was the first country in the world that secured women the right to a legal abortion. The legalization of abortion was not performed to acknowledge the rights of reproductive bodies, instead Nakachi argues that it was passed out of the medical and paternalistic protection of women. Sixteen years later, Vladimir Lenin’s successor, I. V. Stalin, criminalized abortion in 1936, permitting the procedure to occur only on those with severe medical conditions. In 1955, abortions were re-legalized with the driving intent being the recognition of a woman’s right to abortion, pushed by the Soviet Union’s only female minister of health, Mariia D. Kovrigina. Only later did other countries, such as England and the Untied States, follow suit in feminist movements pushing for women to have access to abortions on the legal ground’s of a woman’s right to her body.

The book is divided into six chapters exploring the evolution of abortion rights in the Soviet Union, in which Nakachi delves into political archives, magazine publications and more to trace how women were viewed by policymakers after the war. There isn’t much outside literature covering the experience of Soviet women after WWII, and Nakachi studies how family policies impacted the ways in which women were encouraged to conduct their lives. Prior literature has focused on the Soviet female experience, specifically with a lens on female military participation, written most famously about by Svetlana Alexievich and Anna Krylova. Nakachi is one of the first scholars to cover the Soviet postwar demographic crisis, and the response that Soviet leaders initiated targeting women to increase population rates.

The first few chapters uncover the reasonings behind strict abortion surveillance pre-war, followed by Khrushchev’s pronatalist plan that promoted single motherhood and the “Mother Heroine” in response to a dwindling population as a result of the war. Nakachi details the ways in which abortion access was blamed to cause declining birth rates in Stalin’s time, even though women sought the procedure out of economic need and inability to support a larger family unit. Later in her analysis, Nakachi describes how abortions were made legal once more in 1955 and traces how Soviet policymakers developed family policies with the purposes of manipulating the population to reproduce.

After WWII, most rural communities in the Soviet Union were annihilated and women were the predominant sex. Nikita Khrushchev, as the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party at the time, saw the dire condition that Ukranian women were left in and created a postwar pronatalist policy, the All-Union Soviet 1944 Family Law, meant to increase the number of Soviet workers. The Family Law was supposed to stimulate birth rates by increasing punishment for abortions, implementing postwar “bachelor” taxes for childless workers, promising more state aid to single mothers, and promoting out-of-wedlock childbearing. Khruschchev presented his proposal to Soviet leaders highlighting the problem of the declining birth rate, which would be improved with the policies laid out in the 1944 Family Law proposal. The only caveat was that the draft of policy presented to the public didn’t outright claim the declining birth rates, rather it focused on the state’s main interest to protect the mother. The Family Law decreed its policies a “gift” towards women who needed the state’s protection of the sacred family, miring the political drive behind the policy.

One of the main ways the Family Law intended to promote out-of-wedlock children was barring women from appealing to court to establish child support from the biological father of unregistered marriages. Thus, children’s names were recorded under the family name of the mother and her choice of patronymic. Khrushchev intended to promote men and women to have consensual sexual relations outside of marriage, as a means to increase birth rates. Only in registered marriages were fathers allowed to be legally bound to taking care of the child, letting men off the hook from women claiming child support. The state published that, “unmarried mothers are freed from the necessity of claiming child support for the maintenance of a child, and therefore are not in need of formal identification of who indeed is the father of the child” (p. 41). It is important to note the linguistic manipulation the Soviet Union relied on to portray the policies as being beneficial towards women and protecting their rights, rather than serving a state interest.

Although the intention of the Family Law was to promote more robust family units, it had harmful impacts on gender relations, as women were not able to receive childcare support from biological fathers. In some cases, women were not able to demand child support as their prewar common-law marriages were not considered valid under the Family Law. In addition, the system failed to create a proper record of divorce and couples disregarded the law, leaving common-law marriages to avoid the bureaucracy of registering a divorce. Elena Serebrovskaia, a journalist, published an article in Literaturnaia gazeta about how postwar marriage conditions and the 1944 Family Law contributed to the birth of numerous out-of-wedlock children who were raised without fathers. By the end of 1953, abortion rates had not significantly decreased despite abortion being illegal, reaching 1,404,626 abortions, and proving the failed attempts of the Family Law in reinforcing larger families.

In 1955, a study of the main reasons behind illegal abortions found them to be linked to poor material and living conditions, bad relations with “husbands” and the presence of small children. The Ministry of Health (MZ), spearheaded by Kovrigina, concluded in their report that the criteria for legal abortions needed to expand and include socioeconomic reasons. When the findings were presented to the Sovmin Council of Ministers, individuals from both sides of the debate believed that legal abortion should have limitations, but the “dividing line was recognition of women’s right to decide the timing of motherhood versus and anti-abortion position emphasizing state and professional control” (p. 176). Kovrigina put forth statistics that criminalization of abortion was not an effective method of reducing abortions and suggested improving material conditions for mothers as a way to raise birth rate. Following Kovrigina’s outlined rhetoric, abortion became legal under the conditions that all abortions had to take place in medical facilities and if illegal abortions were carried out doctors would face prosecution. The re-legalization of abortion saved women from seeking underground abortions, but it failed to grant woman the legal “rights” to their bodies. Instead the law framed it that the state allowed the “possibility” of a woman to decide the question of motherhood — women’s reproductive rights were never discussed under socialism (p. 181).

Nakachi brings nuance to her analysis by comparing Soviet policies to those abroad, contextualizing how reproductive bodies were treated across governing bodies. Stalin had wished to make the Soviet Union look more populated, hiding away the grim reality of the famine from 1946 to 1947. Thus, Stalin refused to conduct a census and had the head of the Central Statistical Administration, V. N. Starovskii, single out abortions as being the main cause behind the observed falling birth rate. In a similar fashion, women in Japan were critiqued by the pronatalist government during the war for having a “low moral character as a wife” and being at fault for declining birth rates. Instead of addressing social issues such as poverty and lack of childcare, US policymakers labeled African American women as being “irresponsible” for reproducing “unwanted children” (p. 125). Historically, women have been pinned at fault for aborting fetuses and reducing birth rates, rather than policymakers owning up to the repercussions of their political decisions.

Across the world, access to abortion was a contested topic after the war. In Japan, when the Red Army crossed the border into Manchuria and declared war on Japan, many Japanese women were raped and left pregnant. At the time, abortion was a crime in Japan, but the government set up secret abortion clinics for women to seek medical access. In a similar vein, Soviet doctors wanted to provide women with safe abortions, as a result of the massive postwar demobilization that increased sexual encounters and spread venereal diseases amongst the population. Although the procedure was banned, doctors performed abortions privately on women in need, even though at times the procedure was fatal. Prior to pushing for legalization, Kovrigina was an active participant in Cold War-related attacks on Soviet medicine and condemned doctors for performing secret abortions and receiving compensation for the procedures. After an investigation of the Leningrad Institute for Gynecology and Obstetrics, countless doctors were fired or demoted and hindered any discussion of “doctor’s discretion as the solution for postwar abortion surveillance” (p. 85). Doctors attempted to provide women with healthcare and abortion access after the war, but consequences were met as a result of disobeying the law.

Depending on the cultural context, the right to an abortion has been used as leverage by politicians who desire to seek a certain outcome. As Nakachi presents in the book, the Soviet Union permitted legal abortions, depending on the state’s intended population outcome and stance on a woman’s legal rights. Nakachi’s book is a crucial read for those interested in the Soviet Union, and for those seeking to contextualize the evolution of abortion politics across nations. The legal grounds for abortion access were set in the twentieth century and as political conservatism is on the rise, leading most recently to the US Supreme Court suspending abortion access in overruling Roe v. Wade, it is vital to understand the historical legacy of how governments rationalized the passage of abortion access in the first place.