Abortion and the New Yugoslav Woman

Yugoslavia, not France, was the world’s first country to enshrine the right to abortion in its constitution. Socialist Yugoslavia wielded reproductive regulation as a state and nation-building instrument to construct a unique communist project.

With Branka Bogdan (New Yugoslav Woman: Reproductive Regulation in Socialist Yugoslavia, 2025).

Listen: “Abortion and the New Yugoslav Woman” (Episode #136)

Bonus Extras: “Abortion and the New Yugoslav Woman” (Episode #136)

Ad-free version of “Abortion and the New Yugoslav Woman” (Episode #136).

Transcript: “Abortion and the New Yugoslav Woman” (Episode #136)

PETER KORCHNAK: This and every other episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to episodes ad-free and have access to extended and bonus episodes.

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PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your future doctor, Peter Korchnak.

In March 2024, France became the world’s first country to protect the right to abortion in its constitution. 

Or so the news story went. 

Immediately, and rightfully, voices from the former Yugoslavia protested. France may be the only country today to constitutionally protect the right to terminate a pregnancy, but that’s only if you count countries that exist. It was in fact socialist Yugoslavia that was the first country to include abortion rights in its constitution—more than 50 years before. 

Things are of course slightly more complicated. 

To see just how, I sat down with Branka Bogdan, author of the book New Yugoslav Woman: Reproductive Regulation in Socialist Yugoslavia, out last year from Indiana University Press.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Branka Bogdan is an independent researcher and historian in Auckland, New Zealand. In her work, she focuses on women’s history and its intersection with medicine and science, particularly in the U.S., Yugoslavia, where she was born in 1986, specifically in Sombor, and New Zealand, where she has lived since 1996. 

BRANKA BOGDAN: I talked to my parents a lot at that point because my mum was a doctor during before we left for New Zealand and she spoke to me a lot, you know, one on one about all of these different topics very openly. And so I spoke to them and, you know, ask them about what it was like then for them, and what, what services were available to them, what options were available to them, all of those things, and from then I just sort of sort of started building this larger topic.

PETER KORCHNAK: Bogdan first put her interest in women’s and reproductive rights to work at Family Planning Queensland, a nonprofit. She then got her PhD, in History, from Monash University, in Melbourne. Her book, New Yugoslav Woman, originated in her dissertation.

BRANKA BOGDAN: I did archival research in Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia, and I also did interviews with women who were of reproductive age during social, the socialist years, as well as physicians and activists who worked at that time, and some of them continue to work in those countries now.

PETER KORCHNAK: New Yugoslav Woman is a social and cultural history of how, quote, “Yugoslav communists used reproductive regulation to build a platform of socialism through self-management and to position the country as a conduit between the global North and South.” In covering the development of the health care system and policies, it “traces reproduction as a central facet of socialist Yugoslavia’s state formation through the nation’s laws, medical infrastructure, technological growth, and state-run sex education programs.” 

BRANKA BOGDAN: One of the main things that I found is that the intention was very good. The intention was very ambitious to create [a] very strong biomedical healthcare network across the country, the intention was there, the plans were there, the ideas were there. It was a very strong idea, but the actual reality of it wasn’t as successful as they’d hoped.

For example, centers like Belgrade had great services, had great hospitals, had great birthing centers, had lots of specialists, had lots of trained GPs, all of those sorts of things, but there were many regions many villages that had zero access to health services.

PETER KORCHNAK: That disconnect between idea and implementation, policy and practice is a fixture in the history of reproductive healthcare in Yugoslavia. 

“[T]he state’s efforts ultimately fell short because it never fully endorsed or resourced initiatives that sought to realize equalizing ambitions, due to costs they were unwilling to cover, entrenched patriarchal attitudes regarding gender and women’s sexuality, and a lasting concern over population growth, movement, and its regional discrepancies,” writes Bogdan in New Yugoslav Woman. 

It started out well enough.

BRANKA BOGDAN: The Communist Party of Yugoslavia was very interested in creating a new Yugoslavia in the wake of World War Two. And this was very much tied into the Soviet Union and Soviet policies. The idea was to bring in the Soviet policies, the Constitution, the five year plans, all of those ideas, and then apply it in Yugoslavia, and this was typical across a number of countries that were part of the Soviet bloc.

Of course, Yugoslavia left in the 1950s and formed its own self-management Yugoslav socialism. But the initial idea was based on the Soviet model, and that Soviet model was about giving gender equality to women in Yugoslavia. And what that meant was that women would be equal citizens, and in return for all of these benefits, such as being able to vote and work and access health care, and all of those things, they would be participating citizens of the country, and they would be good socialists that, who would then kind of pass on the socialist message to the next generation.

PETER KORCHNAK: Additional justification was rooted in wartime experience. For one, more than 10 percent of Yugoslavia’s population was killed during the war. So the first immediate postwar need was people.

BRANKA BOGDAN: Yugoslavia took a devastating hit in terms of the population numbers after World War Two. It was devastating, and so there were messages around pronatalism, about bigger family sizes, about having more children, breeding more socialists, but it was definitely more subtle than in other countries, and definitely not as, not as present in legislation and in the constitution, as other countries, such as Romania, for example.

PETER KORCHNAK: Perhaps more importantly, the war elevated the status of women in Yugoslavia. 

One hundred thousand women fought in the Yugoslav Partisan forces, which both defeated Yugoslavia’s enemies during World War II and carried out a socialist revolution. One in four women fighters died in combat and an additional four in ten were wounded. Two million additional women provided support to the resistance and revolution in the rear. Their significant losses and sacrifices for the country led to women gaining great authority in socialist Yugoslavia as having been crucial for its liberation and revolution. Already in 1944, the so-called “woman question” was proclaimed to have been solved.

Check out Episode 88, “(Post)Partisan Women,” for more on that story and as a complement to the present episode.

After the war, a wide range of legislation equalized women’s rights and responsibilities within the Yugoslav society. Women’s political, economic, and social rights were recognized for the first time in the 1946 Constitution. Voting and property rights. Equal pay for equal work. Civil marriage. Divorce. Inheritance rights. Insurance. And, healthcare and reproductive rights. 

“Throughout the socialist period,” writes Bogdan, “the state continually held that progressive laws, free health care, and investment into the domestic production of sex education materials and contraceptive technologies bolstered Yugoslav gender equality.” End quote. Gender and women’s reproductive rights and health were central to the formation and legitimacy of the socialist Yugoslav state.

“Reproductive regulation constituted one aspect of the state’s broader strategy to construct a uniquely Yugoslav communist project,” writes Bogdan. “Reproductive regulation encompassed economic, social and cultural policies, and presented an opportunity to reach into the private lives of all citizens at every stage of life.” 

BRANKA BOGDAN: The constitution and the laws were written in a way that sounded very good, they looked really good on paper, but the reality of the situation didn’t always reflect that intention.

So I always highlight this example of the women’s maternity leave and men’s paternity leave in the 1950s. The idea was that women could have a lot of time off from work, they could also return to work when they wanted to, and they would be able to have a lot of time to breastfeed, to go home and visit their children, all of those sorts of things. The idea was also that there would be fabulous childcare centers that would take children that were attached to large factories or workplaces, and that sort of thing, and the reality of it was that that was much more complex. There weren’t enough childcare centers, so what happened was that women ended up relying on extended family, on neighbors, on that sort of thing.

In workplaces, the reality meant that women would be, you know, for breastfeeding breaks, they would be away from work for upwards of, you know, two or three hours at a time, they weren’t allowed to work after hours or late into the evening, and their shifts had to be limited to a certain amount of time, for example. And so that placed a lot of limitations on what women could actually do, and also who would hire women over a man who wouldn’t have to do all of those different things to support their family at home. There were a lot of legal tools, legislative tools that were implemented, but the daily reality of it being enacted in workplaces was very different.

PETER KORCHNAK: Paternity leave remained in the idea realm, it was never implemented in real life, according to Bogdan. 

The disconnect between policy and practices existed in the provision of health care overall.

BRANKA BOGDAN: Hospitals were present in larger cities. There were clinics for different specialties and subspecialties. For the most part, general practitioners did the bulk of the work in a number of different fields, even if they sort of specialized in certain areas. 

Now, the main problem was the discrepancy of resources around different regions, especially the more isolated villages and rural areas were definitely not serviced as well as the central cities. 

The other problem was that doctors, physicians did not really want to go out into the rural areas. They didn’t want to be placed there, so there was a lot of pushback on that. They wanted to be in the central cities and urban environment, because it was more, well, you know, well-resourced, it wasn’t as isolated, probably the work was going to be a lot easier in terms of resources, the money, all of that sort of thing. 

PETER KORCHNAK: This of course is not a unique problem. Nurse and doctor shortages existed and persist across Europe and the U.S. and are certainly worse in the countryside. Urban areas, larger cities, with higher populations, simply have more healthcare and other infrastructure, that’s just basic economics.

BRANKA BOGDAN: Then over time there was this kind of realization that there wasn’t enough on-the-ground support for people. 

So what they needed to do was disseminate all of this information via a number of different avenues. Some of this was through the women’s press and the women’s magazines. 

PETER KORCHNAK: “As in other nations, exceptionalism was the backbone of the Yugoslav socialist project, and the party used the state-sponsored women’s press to gain legitimacy with the citizenry,” writes Bogdan in New Yugoslav Woman. “Gynecologists dedicated their careers to improving fertility-control techniques and technologies and educating the masses about safer ways to space births.”

BRANKA BOGDAN: The advice column in women’s magazines started to become a really strong piece of the puzzle of bringing Yugoslavia into a biomedical healthcare system age, basically. 

So there were certain experts who would write quite frequently, they had their own columns, they responded to letters from readers.

But also what happened was that they realized that literacy was incredibly low across Yugoslavia. Women’s organizations started sending out people to run literacy workshops across various villages and in different rural areas to bring up the general literacy of the population, but also the health literacy of the population.

PETER KORCHNAK: The discrepancy between policy and practice wasn’t just a matter of excessive ambition on part of the communists or of funding or logistical challenges. Socialist healthcare was being injected into traditional societies.

BRANKA BOGDAN: And this becomes really interesting when they start butting heads with the local wise women and the local kind of traditional health, ethnomedical health system that existed for a long time and continued to exist despite the establishment of the biomedical healthcare system. 

So what happened, for example, was that the Ministry of Health would send out these teams, these traveling teams across different regions, and they would ask them to sort of set up in one village, meet everyone, invite everyone to these literacy and health literacy workshops. Then they would conduct surveys of people’s homes, report back on what they found, you know, did they have electricity, did they have running water, did they have flushing toilets, all of those sorts of things, and then they would also be reporting on things like birthing practices, how midwives in, or wise women in the regions were conducting births, all of those kind of practical everyday things. 

So there was this real overall push to get the centralized healthcare system out into the regions. 

Again, it wasn’t as successful as they hoped, and it wasn’t received that well in a lot of places. People didn’t want to change the ways that they’ve been doing things. 

And some of those practices continued way beyond the establishment of clinics. People didn’t want to go into these impersonal clinics when they could go to the wise woman who has been delivering their babies for generations. It’s not like, oh, here pops up a clinic, and then all of a sudden, yes, everyone’s going to line up and birth there with complete strangers.

They also didn’t want the judgment that came along with it, and the intrusion into their everyday lives.  

PETER KORCHNAK: Another issue was the patriarchal nature of Yugoslav societies. Women may have aided in the wartime victory and participated in post-war reconstruction efforts. But the socialist economy focussed on heavy industries which had much less room for women. Beginning in the 1950s women returned to their traditional home-making tasks or, if they stayed in the workforce,  concentrated in traditional female occupations like basic education, textile industry, and health care; overall, women’s participation in the labor force dropped. They were even banned from the military.

BRANKA BOGDAN: There are all these conversations about wanting to space children, wanting to control when and how pregnancies occur, and all of that sort of thing. But then there’s this real, really strong attitude that pregnancy is a social symbol, a status symbol. For women it proves their, you know, fertility and womanliness. For men, it proves their fertility as well, and their manliness. So, it’s like a really affirmative gendered status symbol. And that’s across the whole period, basically. So that resistance, in terms of the patriarchy, is definitely present. 

PETER KORCHNAK: “[C]ommunist leaders…wielded reproductive regulation as a tool of state formation and international geopolitical positioning,” writes Bogdan. “As a leader of the [Nonaligned Movement], Yugoslavia also led the way for developing countries to adopt policies aimed at reducing their populations by influencing women’s reproductive decisions. By becoming the vanguard of production and expertise in fertility control, the state wielded the authority of science for its own benefit.” End quote.

Contraception centered another policy where real life experience turned out to be different from policy. 

BRANKA BOGDAN: What’s interesting is how vocal they were internationally about women’s access to contraception, for example, but again the reality was that there wasn’t enough contraception to go around. Clinics would receive a shipment of pills, and then they’d distribute them to women who were interested, and then they’d run out. And you know, a few months down the line, the woman would come back and be like, “Okay, great, I’ve been on this pill, it’s been effective, it’s going okay, I’d like to keep going. But there’s no more, there’s no more shipments, there’s no more promise of anything coming down the line. 

Same with IUDs, there weren’t very many available around the country, so that was definitely a big gap as well, and same with the information and education. There just wasn’t enough consistent education and information available  that was also judgment free, judgment and shame free. So there were many, many things that were sort of promised that sounded really good, but then didn’t eventuate on the ground.

When I talked to women around the former Yugoslavia, that became really clear. Oftentimes they knew exactly what certain contraceptives did, for example, or they knew even their sort of pharmaceutical names of many contraceptives, but they themselves never used it, because they couldn’t get it easily, or access it consistently, or because there wasn’t enough variety for them to try different types, so that the side effects, or any unfavorable symptoms would wouldn’t be could be avoided. The knowledge was there, the understanding was there, but the actual use was very low.

PETER KORCHNAK: In that earlier episode, Chiara Bonfiglioli noted that, because of issues with the provision of contraceptives we talked about earlier and because abortion was much more accessible, many women used abortion as a form of birth control. 

BRANKA BOGDAN: The federal government decriminalized abortion in the 1951 penal code, and then legislation evolved, and by the 1960s abortions were legally guaranteed for Yugoslav women. And then after this 1969 general law about abortion access, women were able to access abortion on demand before 10 weeks gestation. 

And then the 1974 Yugoslav constitution affirmed parents’ rights to decide on the number and spacing of their children, and that really reflected the international language of human rights and the international language around women’s rights to choose the timing and spacing of their pregnancies.

PETER KORCHNAK: Article 191 of the 1974 Constitution stated that, “It is the right of every person to freely decide on the birth [or bearing] of children. This right can only be restricted for the protection of health.” End quote.

Which of course is broader than the new provision of the French constitution which guarantees quote, “the freedom of women to resort to abortion.”

Either way, reality bit here too.

BRANKA BOGDAN: In terms of abortion access, women, yes, were guaranteed legal abortion up until 10 weeks, from the [19]60s, but they also had to go to a hospital, they had to report that they wanted an abortion, they had to request that to take place, they had to talk to several experts, many of whom were male, and they had to sort of prove their case, pay some money, and then they had to, you know, go through with the procedure and everything. So the whole system was very much unbalanced and definitely put women in a very vulnerable position, a very public position, where even though legally they were entitled to this healthcare, they were also very much judged and by various members of society. 

Now, this wasn’t the case for everyone, and there is a lot of tolerance and a lot of really positive attitudes regarding abortion as healthcare, but there’s also a lot of remaining judgment, more than you’d think, considering how liberal the abortion policies were at that time.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: The policy versus practice issue did come under public scrutiny. Feminists in Yugoslavia criticized the disconnect, albeit in the later decades.

BRANKA BOGDAN: When you think about feminists, it’s funny because I always think of Vida Tomšič, the Slovenian lawyer and Communist Party, staunch Communist Party member. She was very adamantly not a feminist and would never have described herself in that way. And that comes up a lot in terms of, well, we don’t need feminism, because we’ve already achieved all of those things that Western feminists are complaining about. That’s the sort of the rhetoric that’s coming up throughout that period. 

The things that they’re asking for that the demanding throughout the socialist period is very much aligned with the principles of feminism, even if there isn’t the label being attributed to it.

PETER KORCHNAK: After the Partisan generation faded from the scene, a new wave of feminists came up in the 1970s and 80s, and the discrepancy between policy and practice was one of their central critiques. 

“While recognizing that Yugoslav laws were advanced in comparison to laws in Western Europe, second wave feminists denounced the faulty application of these laws and the persistence of patriarchal relations in the public and in the private sphere,” writes Chiara Bonfiglioli in a 2014 article on the subject. 

BRANKA BOGDAN: Later on, in the sort of 1980s you start getting women who are utilizing feminist language and even identifying as feminists themselves. Groups are sort of forming, and these groups are starting to talk to French feminists, for example, but they’re also coming up against this idea that what they’re asking for, what they’re demanding is very different to what Western feminists are talking about, and a lot of it has to do with reproductive health care and the fact that the Western feminists are sort of saying, you know, we need this baseline of access to abortion care, access to contraception, before we can even begin to think about, you know, equal pay and access to work and equality in that space. 

PETER KORCHNAK: “As far as Yugoslav women were concerned,” according to Bogdan, “the socialist period created some striking advances, particularly to do with women’s literacy and education and in labor force participation.” End quote. However, while the position of women had fundamentally improved in many areas, the second-wave feminist scholars and activists saw the limits of these improvements in the public sphere and their lack in the private sphere.

“Yugoslav feminists, like those of other Eastern European states, were more concerned about equality between men and women in terms of employment and promotion at work and with the issue of domestic violence,” writes Bogdan.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: After its dissolution, Yugoslavia and life in it passed into the realm of memory.

BRANKA BOGDAN: Women remember the Yugoslav years, the socialist years, sorry, as very, as very pro-women. Women felt like they were receiving equal treatment, like they had lots of opportunities. That would be the pat answer, right, like that would be the immediate answer to what was it like for women during Yugoslav socialism. 

But it’s not until you start sort of asking about the specific experiences of, you know, pregnancy care, of childbirth, of what it was like in certain hospitals or certain clinics, how did male doctors treat them, all those questions— What were people’s attitudes like to contraception? Generally, did you talk to other people about contraception? Did you tell your girlfriends that you were on the pill? All of those sorts of things. It starts to become very muddy. It’s not a clean picture of pro-women, pro-reproductive rights, socialist Yugoslavia. It’s not a simple picture anymore.

PETER KORCHNAK: Interviewing women across the former Yugoslavia about their memories of their socialist experience, Bogdan found quote “feelings of guilt and shame were common in relation to matters of sex, sexuality, contraception, and reproduction. [F]ree access to reproductive and sexual health services, including contraception and pregnancy termination, [coexisted] with women’s daily experience of their sexuality and reproduction as sites of stigma and abuse.” 

The post-socialist, post-Yugoslav period saw some changes in the reproductive rights arena as well. 

BRANKA BOGDAN: After the official breakup of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav wars, every country just, you know, made their own way in terms of the woman question, as they talk about. 

There’s the legal side, which has definitely changed in some ways across those countries, and then there’s also the public attitude towards women in general, women’s rights and women’s reproductive health in general, as well.

PETER KORCHNAK: As Chiara Bonfiglioli noted on the show, in the post socialist, post Yugoslav period there was a re-traditionalization of gender relations. In the nationalist and particularly wartime discourses women became important as mothers, in order to help reproduce the nation. The economic transition pushed women further away both from the public sphere and the labor markets as so many women-centric companies, including those in the textile industry for example, shuttered.

BRANKA BOGDAN: What’s really prominent is religion. The Catholic influence in Croatia definitely impacted the ways that abortion care and contraceptive care has been made available. 

There are lots of protests, pro-life protests, these Walk for Life initiatives that are held annually as anti-abortion marches. And a lot of people are in support of these pro-life advocacy groups. The Catholic side of things, is definitely very influential there.

In Serbia too, there’s all of these sort of more conservative anti-abortion attitudes coming up in terms of the Orthodox Christian traditions of that country as well. 

So religion has played a significant role in how people view abortion and contraception in the postsocialist space.

PETER KORCHNAK: That said, Serbia did retain the right to abortion in its 2006 Constitution, which in Article 63, states, “Everyone has the right to freely decide on the birth of [their] children.” 

But then the next paragraph adds a telling corrective: “The Republic of Serbia encourages parents to decide to have children and helps them to do so.”

At any rate—

BRANKA BOGDAN: For many countries the healthcare aspect hasn’t changed a huge amount. There are still legal avenues for abortion in lots of places, but the public attitude has definitely changed a lot. 

I talked to a lot of physicians who are still active in that space, and they talk a lot about how abortion laws have been restricted a little bit. They’ve also been calls and advocacy for more restrictions on abortion laws, particularly in Croatia, and then there’s also more people who are conscientiously objecting to providing abortion services, which leaves a huge, huge gap in the healthcare system that is filled by a lot of other physicians who are still willing to provide that service.

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

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Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić.

Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys. 

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!

BRANKA BOGDAN: In the recent political climate internationally, you know, conservative groups pulling back women’s reproductive rights in a very significant way, so Yugoslavia, or the post-Yugoslav states, are not unique in that.

But what is also really important to remember is that there are very strong advocacy groups that are pro-women, that are pro-choice, very much pro-human rights for women around the world, and in the postsocialist countries as well and. Those women’s voices, the voices of the physicians who continue to do really important work and continue to push for equality and for freedom of rights and decisions by women. I think that that’s something that it needs to be very much remembered in this space. Women are fighting, and they continue to fight.