ABSTRACT
During the disintegration of the Yugoslav federal state in the 1980s, a certain ideological shift occurred within the official attitude toward the so-called woman question under self-managed socialism. This shift was marked by a discussion that arose among demographers in the mid-1980s about the Yugoslav birthrate. The main issue was the "problem of the high Albanian birthrate" in Kosovo and the low birthrate in Slovenia, Serbia, and Croatia. The first new feminist groups in Slovenia came into existence during the mid-1980s. They emerged within several so-called new social movement groups, being more or less self-sufficient already, within the one-party system. The abortion rights campaign was one occasion in which the relatively small size of the Slovenian state was an advantage: Nobody was left untouched by the discussion; everybody expressed an opinion. The emancipation of women has always been the legitimizing principle of socialist societies/Eastern European states.
