UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference

Inclusion Exclusion

16-18th February 2006

Saturday 18 February 12:00 – 1:30: Panel J3: Mothers and Wives

Lorena Anton (University of Bucharest): ‘Abortion and the making of the ‘socialist mother’ during Communist Romania’

From 1966 to 1989, the Romanian Communist Party prohibited by law the right of pregnancy interruption, all in the name of the sanctity of the Romanian communist nation. In the public sphere, reproduction was fundamentally associated with „the nation" and its needs. Thus, every communist subject had to become an important part of Ceausescu’s projects, and, most of all, every Romanian woman had to fulfill her role by becoming a prolific socialist mother. Even if all the other communist states of the Eastern Europe prohibited abortion, in a way or another, during their socialist regimes, in Romania "the politics of duplicity" (for using Gail Kingman’s term) concerning reproduction will remain a singular example by its force and its negativism.

The main aim of this paper is to illustrate the ways by witch, with the help of the public discourse, a new identity had been constructed during the ’60, and reinforced periodically until the fall of the Communist Regime, its center being dominated by the "socialist mother". The communist discourse about "the heroine mother" (mama eroină) developed, in time, as the only accepted narration, all other identities or counter-narratives being automatically excluded. Starting from the articles within Scînteia, the Party’s official journal, to films, radio shows or literature, the portrait of the socialist mother irrupted everywhere. Of course, the making of the socialist mother excluded even the idea of the existence of abortions executed any other ways than the ones permitted by the Communist state.

Nevertheless, in spite of the Party’s rules, and especially because along with abortion, Ceausescu prohibited also any existence of contraception on the Romanian territory, abortion had to developed itself as a common practice during those years. The individual memory of those times, recollected by the author during a three years research, in the form of oral-histories, constitutes, over the years, an alternative discourse, excluded during Communism, but possible after its fall as a form of counter-story at the public historical narration of the socialist mother. The second part of the paper will present an analysis of these individual narratives, excluded during Communism, but included now in the memory of this regime, in terms of recurrent topoi and their relation with the official communist discourse concerning abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania.