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Book Talk • Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture (Dr. Michele Rivkin-Fish)

February 6 @ 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Professor Michele Rivkin-Fish’s second book, Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics (Vanderbilt UP, 2025) traces the work of health professionals, writers, and activists who drove a revolution in Russian reproductive practices by enabling the routine use of abortion to be replaced with contraceptive habits. The book spans six-and-a-half decades of Soviet and post-Soviet history, beginning from the re-legalization of abortion in 1955 and extending through the second decade of the 21st century. Detailing the rise of family planning institutions for both clinical and educational goals, the book reveals how Russian contraceptive advocates built a culturally-salient form of liberalism by emphasizing that contraceptive habits would strengthen families and increase fertility. Still, opponents of family planning succeeded in discrediting and defunding these new institutions on the basis of claims that they would reduce fertility and thereby pose a threat to Russia’s national security. The book reveals Russian nationalists’ overriding focus on reproductive and demographic sovereignty at the expense of science and women’s health.


Michele Rivkin-Fish is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her work has examined Russia’s health care reforms, debates and policies on reproduction and demography, sex education, and the daily struggles of women and men to secure well-being among privatization and nationalism.


Please register before February 5th.

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Date:
February 6
Time:
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
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