This article introduces to Japanese readers an analysis of the Soviet Union’s postwar pronatalist policy and its effects on gender and society as published in Mie Nakachi, Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (Oxford University Press, 2021). In particular, it highlights the evolution of the 1944 Family Law’s formulation and implementation, explaining how the introduction of this policy eventually led to the world’s first legalization of abortion based on the recognition of women’s right to abortion in a country where no feminist movements were allowed.

On July 8, 1944 the Soviet government promulgated the new family law. This was in response to the unprecedented scale of demographic crisis the Soviet Union faced after WWII: the loss of 27 million people and an extremely skewed sex imbalance. Millions of women had lost their past partners or future mates in the war. In order to recover from this crisis at an accelerated pace, N. S. Khrushchev, the leader in Ukraine during the war, drafted a pronatalist proposal and sent it to Moscow, where after multiple revisions it became the postwar family law.

One of the most significant and questionable features of Khrushchev’s brainchild was the encouragement of the birth of out-of-wedlock children. In order to achieve this goal, the law encompassed several fundamental changes, such as making only registered marriage legal, denying out-of-wedlock children the right to be registered under their fathers’ names, and releasing fathers from legal and financial responsibilities for their out-of-wedlock children. In consequence, women’s standing in gender relations suffered. Moreover, equality between children born in marriage and those born out-of-wedlock, established after the 1917 Revolution, would disappear.

Eleven years later, in 1955, the Soviet government re-legalized abortion. Does this mean that the pronatalist policy had ended? If so, did Soviet demography recover from the war, thanks to the postwar pronatalist policy of 1944? Or was this reform a part of the broader de-Stalinization process?

This article discusses the policy’s effects on demography, gender relations, and family and argues that the most important context for the reversal of the Stalinist criminalization of abortion in 1936 was not the death of Stalin in 1953, but the ongoing criticism of postwar pronatalist policy coming from Soviet professionals, particularly doctors, female party members, and women, a drumroll that had already begun in the late 1940s. Mariia D. Kovrigina, the first and last female All-Union Health Minister, promoted the idea of women’s right to abortion, which became the core of re-legalization. However, this historic development was muted due to the special, typically Soviet, circumstances of this process. In this way, this article points out possibilities as well as limitations for the reproductive rights movement under state socialism.