CREES Noon Lecture: A Global Perspective on Campaigns for Reproductive Rights: Insights from Soviet and Contemporary Russia

The first ever public campaign to defend access to legal abortion in Russia took place in 2011. Notably, Russian advocates avoided common feminist slogans claiming reproductive “rights” and “choice.” Instead, they implored the state to “Fight Abortion, Not Women.” This slogan expressed opposition to the routine use of abortion for fertility control and implicitly demanded state support for contraceptives. Rivkin-Fish will trace the historical conditions that made “Fight Abortion, Not Women” a salient message for the health professionals who established Russia’s first state and non-governmental organizations for family planning.

Rivkin-Fish’s research focuses on reproductive politics and health in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. She is the author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (2005), which won the Basker Prize for Outstanding Research on Gender and Health from the Society of Medical Anthropology, and the Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Her most recent book is Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics (2024).