Interrupce v socialistickém Československu z foucaultovské perspektivy

• Authors: Dudova Radka

Title variants

EN

ABORTION IN SOCIALIST CZECHOSLOVAKIA - A FOUCAULDIAN PERSPECTIVE

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The right to end an unwanted pregnancy as an integral part of the full citizenship of women has been influenced, reinfluenced, and questioned by different actors in the Czech Republic since the 1950s. Until 1986 the right to abortion was not viewed as a woman's personal right, but depended upon the decision of abortion commissions and was influenced by the current demographic and political situation. The decision-making process was a very embarrassing experience for many women, who in fact had no other means of contraception available to them. In this paper, the authoress analyses the legal and political regulation of abortion from the perspective of Foucault´s theory of governmentality and biopower. Abortion regulation is an example of how state power influences and disciplines the bodies of its subjects, how it regulates the population and shapes it according to the government's needs. Through the regulation of abortion, the state not only attempted to restrict a woman's right to make decisions about her own body, but also defined which of its citizens should or should not become a parent and under what circumstances, and who should or should not have the right to be born. In the text the authoress first presents the theory of governmentality, then she analyses the periods of the regulation of abortion in socialist Czechoslovakia, and finally she shows how this regulation can be understood as an instrument of a specific form of governmentality typical of totalitarian communist regime.

Keywords

EN

ABORTION; BODY; GOVERNMENTALITY; REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Discipline

• SOCIOLOGY: SOCIOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Gender, rovné příležitosti, výzkum (Gender, Equal Opportunities, Research)
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 25-36
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Dudova Radka

• Radka Dudova, Sociologicky ustav AV CR, v.v.i., Jilska 1, Praha 1, 110 00, Czech Republic; http://dlib.lib.cas.cz/4566/

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

09CZAAAA066811