“Gypsies”/Roma and the politics of reproduction in post-Stalinist Central-Eastern Europe

This chapter examines reproductive politics in post-Stalinist Central-Eastern Europe between the 1950s and the 1980s. It amends recent scholarship pointing to a backlash in gender equality during the decades following the Thaw. An intersectional perspective of gender and race/ethnicity shows that the pronatalism that dominated reproductive discourses, policies, and practices in the region targeted only select groups of women. The main argument of the chapter is that “new eugenics” characterized postwar reproductive politics intertwined with the racialist thinking and prejudices against “Gypsies”/Roma that existed in state socialist societies. The cases of post-World War II Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria show that this resulted in anti-natalism directed at “Gypsy”/Romani women in the framework of family planning, which aimed at ensuring good quality and healthy birth.