In the countries of the former Eastern bloc (and the USSR), abortion politics followed a different historical path than in Western Europe. In Czechoslovakia, abortion was made legal relatively early on, almost as soon as the social and political turmoil that followed World War II and the communist coup in 1948 had settled. Unlike in Western Europe, however, it was not legalized in response to pressure from civil society or the feminist movement. It was a bureaucratic decision made in relation to specific macrosocial and political circumstances. The Czechoslovak Act on Artificial Termination of Pregnancy in 1957 made abortion legal on certain conditions. Special commissions were established and endowed with the authority to decide whether to grant women permission for abortion on demand. The decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy was thus not placed directly in the hands of women.

What shaped and reshaped the bodily citizenship of women and the right of women to control and make decisions about their own bodies in Czechoslovakia during the second half of the twentieth century? One possible way to answer this question is through Michel Foucault's theory of governmentality, which explains how modern society's control mechanisms are exercised. This type of analysis represents a way of examining the nature of the strategies and techniques that the government deployed in the state-socialist system. Abortion regulation serves here as an example of how the body and corporality were governed in order to shape the population according to a specific rationality, the intention behind which was to strengthen the state and its power. Not only did abortion legislation in Czechoslovakia regulate the right of women to control their own bodies, but it also determined which subjects should or should not have the right to become a parent and under what circumstances, who should or should not be born and when, and who was and who was not a “good” subject of the government.

This article analyzes these questions using Foucault's concept of biopower and theory of governmentality. Although this concept was developed in the context of modern Western societies (Rose, O'Malley, and Valverde Reference Rose, O'Malley and Valverde2006, 84; Sigley Reference Sigley2006, 490) and has been applied mostly to the study of liberal and neoliberal Western democratic systems (see Lemke Reference Lemke2007, 45), I show that abortion legislation in state-socialist Czechoslovakia was a specific instrument of governmentality typical of totalitarian communist regimes.

FOUCAULT'S CONCEPT OF GOVERNMENTALITY

Before he developed his concept of governmentality, presented in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978 and 1979 (Foucault Reference Foucault2004), Foucault introduced the notion of pouvoir disciplinaire (disciplinary power). He distinguished it from pouvoir souverain (sovereign power), the form of power typical in feudal society. In a system of sovereign power, only the monarch enjoys “individuality,” whereas the individuality of others is overshadowed by their membership in a family, clan, rank in the nobility, and so on. By contrast, disciplinary power requires its subjects to be as individualized as possible, to have individual identities, so that they are governable by multiple disciplinary regimes and so that they accept for themselves the norms that are imposed upon them. As Focault (Reference Foucault1977, 138) put it: “What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, and its behaviour. The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it.”

Foucault analyzed the new economics of power in his book Discipline and Punish: In the modern-day prison, the individual becomes an object of investigation and experimentation, an object of modern scientific knowledge. The objective is not just to punish but to “retrain” and adapt the individual (in this case, prisoner), and this is achieved by acting not just on his body but on all of his time, physical gestures, and everyday habits (Foucault Reference Foucault1977; Reference Foucault2003a, 48). This kind of all-encompassing control over the individual is exercised through the application of modern knowledge, classification, and observation well beyond the scope of punishment. Technology is applied to the body of the individual, and its primary objective is to coerce him or her into accepting the widespread ideas that conform to the imperatives of industrial, capitalist society (Foucault Reference Foucault1977). In this sense, disciplinary power is productive—it produces new forms of subjectivity. By “training” the body, it shapes subjects that are highly efficient at performing certain tasks. But disciplinary power does not just produce subordinate individuals; the nature of disciplinary power is not epitomized by the sovereign–subject relationship. Rather, according to Foucault (Reference Foucault1980b, 98), disciplinary power “is employed and exercised through a net-like organization,” and individuals “are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power.” Thus, the bodies in this relationship are not just the passive targets of power; rather, they exercise a coercive power themselves.

From disciplinary power Foucault next came up with the concept of biopower (biopouvoir). In his 1976 lecture at the Collège de France (published as Society Must be Defended; Foucault Reference Foucault2003b), in the course of analyzing state racism, Foucault described the birth of a new form of power (or rather a technology of power) that he called “biopower,” which figured with increasing importance in his subsequent work. Unlike the mechanisms of sovereign power (which involves the right of seizure, including even the seizure of a person's life) or disciplinary power (which is about disciplining and punishing individual bodies), the mechanisms of biopower are finely intertwined with the technologies of security. Instead of blocking, bending, and destroying forces, biopower aims to produce them, to help them grow and organize. It is a power that cares for life—“a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimise, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (Foucault 1980a, 137).

Biopower is a normalizing power, its objective being to ensure the preservation and reinforcement of the social system against “non-normal” or potentially dangerous individuals. The mechanisms of this power are exercised not by controlling the operations of the body, the ordering of time, or the repetition of actions but by preventively monitoring any signs of deviation from their biological origins. Here, attention shifts away from the body of the individual toward environmental, genetic, and intergenerational factors.

Foucault claimed that since the seventeenth century, power over life has evolved into two basic forms linked by a whole group of relationships. One form centers on the body as a machine: It focuses on training the body, increasing its abilities, usefulness, and docility. The exercise of discipline is the power procedure employed toward this end. The second form, which evolved slightly later, concerns the species-body, “the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of biological processes” (Foucault 1980a, 139). It is affected by various interventions and regulatory controls that Foucault summarily referred to as the “biopolitics of the population.” More specifically: “The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed” (1980a, 139).

Disciplinary mechanisms and the mechanisms of population control thus overlap and interrelate. On one hand, institutions like the army and schools are created; on the other, the population is controlled via demographic management analyzing the relationship between populations and resources, the circulation of wealth, and so on (1980a, 140). According to Foucault (Reference Foucault1980a, 141), there is no doubt that biopower was an essential element in the evolution of capitalism, which could only proceed through the controlled integration of the body into the apparatus of production and by adapting the population to economic processes: “The investment of the body, its valorisation, and the distributive management of its forces were at the time indispensable.” As I shall demonstrate, the characteristics of biopower were in a certain sense even more apparent in the state-socialist system, where elements of coercive force were coupled with disciplinary power and biopower, and combined and reinforced in various spheres of life.

Foucault (1980a, 136–37) points out that although the main objective of this new technology is to foster life, death remains a presence, even more so than in the past: “Wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations.” He argues that racism provides an explanation for this paradox by justifying the killing of the degenerates and deviants who pose a biological threat to the purity of the race and whose elimination will make the state stronger and more vigorous.

Nonetheless, biopower also manifests through far more subtle means and practices. In the eighteenth century, “population” became an economic and political problem: population as wealth, as manpower, or as labor capacity. Governments realized that they were no longer working simply with subjects or even “a people” but with “a population,” with all the specific phenomena and variables attached thereto: birth and death rates, life expectancy, state of health, and forms of sustenance and of habitation. At the core of the economic and political problem of population is sex: Statistics on fertility, marrying age, contraception, and abortion acquired key significance. The sexual behavior of the population began to be the subject of analysis and the target of intervention (Foucault 1980a, 25). The “global strategy” of biopower (as opposed to the “individual strategy” of disciplinary power) is directly linked to the advance of medical power into the sphere of political control over the population.

Foucault calls the specific way in which this power is performed “governmentality.” He formulated the theory of governmentality in connection with his reflections on the state. For him, the state does not have any a priori form or nature—it is just the sum of social practices of ruling or “government.” These social practices are guided by a specific type of rationality, and he called this rationality governmentality.

By government, Foucault meant not just the influencing and directing of other people's behavior but also the “control' of the self”; it could be described as “the conduct of the conduct” (Reference Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow1982, 212–15). According to Foucault, governmentality involves not just the technologies of power—technologies that determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination. It also involves technologies of the self (Reference Foucault, Martin, Gutman and Hutton1988, 18): technologies that shape the subject, namely, the individuals that make up the state. “Government” is thus applied from within as “self-control.”

Foucault defined governmentality as “the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculation and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security” (1991, 102). It is “at once internal and external to the state, since it is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on” (1991, 103).

Governmentality emerged as a specific and new art of government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it was really deployed in the eighteenth century when population began to be an issue. Unlike sovereign rule, government has an objective of its own: to reach “an arrangement of things” that is convenient for everyone being governed (e.g., by producing the greatest possible amount of wealth, providing the people with adequate means of subsistence, enabling the population to multiply) (Foucault Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991). As such, the instruments of government, instead of being laws, become a range of multiform tactics. This new political rationality rests on two basic elements: governmental apparatuses and a body of various types and systems of knowledge. Successful government is conditioned by “the knowledge of things, of the objectives that can and should be attained, and the disposition of things required to reach them” (1991, 96).

Foucault focuses attention not on the abstract concept of the state, but on the specific practices or “techniques of government.” Since the eighteenth century, the ultimate end of the action of any government is its population. Government acts on it either directly, through large-scale campaigns, or indirectly, through practices that influence birth rates and direct the flow of people into certain regions or activities. One of the main technical factors behind the new rationality of government is statistics: Statistics reveal that a population has its own specific patterns and characteristics that are irreducible to those of individuals or families (Foucault Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991).

Governmentality involves various technologies and strategies that evolve into a level of power that produces specific knowledge and truths, and these secure rule and discipline. According to Foucault (Reference Foucault1971), all forms of knowledge and truth are constituted through discourse: Discourse defines and produces the objects of our knowledge, and it also defines the rules that prescribe certain ways of talking about the topics and exclude others. Knowledge is then applied directly and indirectly to human bodies via different strategies of government and self-government. The production of knowledge, and knowledge itself, is thus closely tied up with power.

GOVERNMENTALITY IN A NONLIBERAL CONTEXT

Foucauldian governmentality was used mainly as a tool for analyzing liberal and neoliberal systems of the 1980s and 1990s (see, e.g., Barry, Osborne, and Rose Reference Barry, Osborne and Rose1996; Burchel, Gordon, and Miller Reference Burchel, Gordon and Miller1991; Dean and Hindess Reference Dean and Hindess1998). Studies of governmentality mostly neglected non-Western and nonliberal contexts (Sigley Reference Sigley2006, 490–93). The question is whether and how it can be applied to the programs, strategies, and technologies of government of the state-socialist regime that existed in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s–80s. Power in this setting was less dispersed than in liberal systems, where self-government by the subjects of government gained more importance than disciplinary forms of rule. In the state-socialist system, those who governed were significantly more centralized, concentrated within a single locus—the communist nomenclature. Power was not legitimated by democratic elections or free-market logic. Unlike liberal forms of government, the state-socialist system did not exercise power and govern in conditions of freedom (see Hindess Reference Hindess2001).

Nonetheless, there are many reasons why the governmentality analytic framework is suited to the study of the state-socialist system and even very fruitful (especially for studying regulation of the private sphere and the reproductive behavior of the people). According to Foucault (Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991), the “governmentalisation” of the state does not eliminate sovereignty or discipline. On the contrary, “discipline was never more important or more valorised than at the moment when it became important to manage the population” (1991, 102). Foucault, in fact, says that there is a sovereignty-discipline-government triangle that primarily targets the population. The state's security apparatus is its mechanism of power (Foucault Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991).

In his Collège de France lecture in 1976 (2003b), Foucault developed the concept of biopower as manifested in the Nazi and state-socialist regimes. He hypothesized that socialism actually reworked or reinvested the same power mechanisms constituted in the capitalist state: “Socialism has made no critique of the theme of biopower[;] it has in fact taken it up, developed, reimplanted, and modified it in certain aspects” (2003b, 261). He claimed that both systems embraced the same idea, namely, that the essential function of society is “to take control of life, to manage it, to compensate for its aleatory nature, to explore and reduce biological accidents and possibilities” (2003b, 261).

Accordingly, in state-socialist Czechoslovakia, the politics and policies directed at the population were far-reaching, universally applicable, and given much public importance. Expert knowledge was given a prominent role, and was intertwined with the rationale of state-socialist government as it both fed state ideology and was itself informed by it. Moreover, the technologies of power were not limited to the legislation, regulations, and practices of the state-socialist ruling elite, but had more subtle and dispersed levels (including the self-government of subjects) (see also Rose, O'Malley, and Valverde Reference Rose, O'Malley and Valverde2006, 89).

According to Sigley (Reference Sigley2006), the concept of governmentality need not be limited in its applicability to Western liberal democracies. He uses the term “socialist arts of government” or “socialist governmentality” to refer to a system that exercised government not through “the tactics of ‘freedom and liberty,’ but through a distinct planning and administrative rationality . . . which is nonetheless a product of the same process that Foucault partly outlines in the governmentality lecture” (Sigley Reference Sigley2006, 491). Advanced liberal societies also deploy sovereign and authoritarian measures, at least toward some of their members (see Hindess Reference Hindess2001; Power Reference Power2005). But while in the liberal systems freedom and unfreedom cannot be clearly separated, in the state-socialist forms of rule, the freedom of the subject was situated in the future and was to arrive with the emergence of a new socialist human, whose morals and capacity for control over the self, desires, and needs were supposed to represent the ideal self-governing subject of communist society. In the meantime, men and women were not yet capable of governing themselves properly and thus had to be governed through other disciplinary methods, such as coercion, constraint, and oppression.

According to Rose, O'Malley, and Valverde (Reference Rose, O'Malley and Valverde2006), the study of governmentalities requires the identification of their specific rationalities, the conditions in which these rational principles were formed, the principles and knowledge that they borrow from and generate, the practices of which they consist, and the ways in which they are exercised. The governmentality framework allows us to study the technologies of power with an analysis of the political rationality that underpins them. This means that by analyzing the regulations, measures, institutions, and practices surrounding abortion, it becomes possible to identify how the female body was understood and conceptualized in the government rationale of state-socialist Czechoslovakia in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, an analysis of the politics of abortion in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s–80s allows us to explore how “socialist governmentality” (Sigley Reference Sigley2006, 491) or “totalitarian governmentality” (Dean Reference Dean1999, 131–48) was put into practice.

BIOPOWER AND REPRODUCTION

An analysis of legislative measures relating to abortion shows how medicine and governing institutions construct the female body in terms of its reproductive function. The regulations determining the conditions under which abortion is allowed and conducted and the measures accompanying these rules are formulated with this end in mind.

The regulation of fertility and reproduction at the social level is not, in any case, the reserve of state socialism. As Heitlinger (Reference Heitlinger1987, 15) explains: “All societies intervene in procreation. The processes of giving birth and raising children are too important for societies to leave uncontrolled, though controls do not always work.” Nor is this a historically new phenomenon, as Tinková has shown in the Czech case (Reference Tinková2004): In the past, a mechanism of control or restriction, for example, involved making it difficult for certain people to marry. Tinková also uses the example of abortion and infanticide to illustrate how the nature of social control has changed—from the exemplarily cruel punishment of individual cases to the existence of a sophisticated system of control and prevention that encompassed a “whole” complex of minute sanctions and preventive disciplinary measures, a central role in which was played by constant, anonymous, and manifold surveillance (Tinková Reference Tinková2004, 335). As infanticide gradually ceased to be a part of the religious, moral-theological, and social-prevention discourse and began to be conceptualized primarily within the framework of the psychobiological discourse of doctors, biopower acquired more importance.

Although every society regulates reproduction and legislatively defines and restricts access to abortion, there are several ways in which this is done. Heitlinger (Reference Heitlinger1987, 19) notes that although cross-national comparisons of the population policies of former Western and Eastern Europe (in the 1950s–70s) are difficult to do because some Western European countries severely restricted access to abortion and birth control, and others had very advanced fertility policies (e.g., France), while at the same time there were socialist countries with a very permissive tradition (East Germany), it is still possible to trace differences in the approaches taken by socialist and nonsocialist countries to the “problem”‘ of low fertility. None of the Western countries could have gotten away “with creating as systematic, extensive, and resolute a programme of fertility policy” (Heitlinger Reference Heitlinger1987, 267) as those prepared in the Eastern European states. The political pluralism in Western states meant that various ideologies always coexisted and that no policy of this kind ever received universal support. In the 1960s, the influence of the feminist movement began to play a role in this area, as it took an open stand against the existing reproductive policies. Within the framework of limited government, only minor fertility policies could be introduced. Reproductive decisions in these countries were understood more as a couple's private matter. Moreover, in the 1960s, these countries were not very concerned about declining fertility owing to the baby boom that followed World War II and the import of labor from abroad (which was not really an option in socialist countries) (Heitlinger Reference Heitlinger1987, 21).

The situation was different in the countries of the Eastern bloc. Policies concerning fertility and reproduction were very broad and pervasive, and the public debate was restricted and limited to just some actors. As Wolchik showed (Reference Wolchik, Sodaro and Wolchik1983), experts and specialist elites played a significant role in formulating these policies in the socialist states. Those involved in the debate included not just demographers but also physicians and other health-care professionals, psychologists, economists, legal experts, writers, and others. Socialist governmentality thus developed in close rapport with the construction of knowledge on bodies, psychologies, reproduction, health, and the economy.

THE ROLE OF EXPERTS AND THE REGULATION OF ABORTION AS PART OF SOCIALIST GOVERNMENTALITY

In 1955, abortion on demand was made legal in the USSR and in subsequent years also in other Eastern European countries—Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland. In Czechoslovakia, legislation legalizing abortion came into force in 1957. Unlike in democratic countries, the abortion legalization in state-socialist Czechoslovakia in 1957 was more a bureaucratic decision taken in response to macrosocial and political circumstances. In the interwar period, women and the women's movement in Czechoslovakia had engaged in organized political action in an effort to change the legislation on abortion, but at that time they had been unsuccessful (see Musilová Reference Musilová2007, 76–83).

The most important actors in the push for the new legislation and in explaining it to the public were the experts (specifically, medical experts who occupied official posts in the structures of power). Medical arguments dominated the public discussion that preceded the bill's adoption. The argument was that, despite the illegality of abortion, the number of abortions was still high and abortions were being performed by unskilled people in unsuitable conditions. Poor hygienic conditions and the inexperience of abortionists meant that illegal abortions were taking a heavy toll on women's health.

Wolchik (Reference Wolchik, Sodaro and Wolchik1983) pointed out how expert input tended to be applied to policy issues that were problematic but not ideologically sensitive (i.e., no threat to the existing political order or the power of the political leaders). Reproduction, child care, and, more specifically, abortion were just such issues. But the real influence wielded by experts in the state-socialist regime was determined by two important factors: their resources (i.e., their expertise and access to top political decision makers) and the general political climate (Wolchik Reference Wolchik, Sodaro and Wolchik1983, 115). Over the course of important debates, experts formed their own alliances—often informal—and took an active role in arguing for the adoption of various population measures (Wolchik Reference Wolchik, Sodaro and Wolchik1983).

The role of medical experts in the debates on abortion was crucial throughout the period of state socialism. Gynecologists were, in fact, the most publicly visible advocates of legal abortion during the communist period. They set the agenda, they pushed the issue forward, and they retained control over the issue. Not all doctors, of course, held the same view on this issue. Some were “progressive” and advocated for legalization in cooperation with, and with the support of, leading authorities of the Communist Party, exerting maximum efforts to make effective contraception widely accessible. Some were more conservative (possibly from a Catholic background), questioned the benefits of legal abortion, and sometimes refused to perform abortions after the law came into effect. The debate in 1957 was thus carried on in medical terms, with both sides using the health of women as their main argument. In the parliamentary debates, this medical discourse was then adopted by legislators and speakers (see Dudova Reference Dudova2010).

Experts also played a major role in changing the abortion law in 1986, when the abortion commissions were abolished. Next to gynecologists, psychologists were the other most visible party in the public debate, and their views were widely disseminated in the media. Some of them exercised an influence through the Governmental Population Commission, a forum for engaging in discussion with the government and party representatives and with representatives of other organizations, such as the Czechoslovak Union of Women. There were several channels of influence that experts exercised on policymaking. One of them was the use of informal contacts. For example, Jiří Šráček, an influential gynecologist in the 1980s, reports that he and his friend and colleague Vladimir Wynnyczuk together lobbied Čestmír Adam, the director of the Social and Health Committee of Parliament and deputy chair of Parliament (Czech National Council), and that Adam was a former schoolmate and friend of Wynnyczuk. Another way of having influence over the issue was through membership in formal state organizations, in this case particularly the Governmental Population Commission. Šráček acted there as an expert on family planning (personal interview with Šráček, June 19, 2009).

The Governmental Population Commission, in fact, had considerable authority and power over the proposal of new legislation. The task of the commission was to provide the government with materials, make policy recommendations, and monitor their implementation. The commission also assigned research institutes with research themes that needed addressing (Heitlinger Reference Heitlinger1987; Kalinová Reference Kalinová1999, 24). The Population Commission collaborated closely with abortion commissions and was supposed to issue abortion-policy recommendations. Starting in 1971, the commission was made up of deputy ministers and representatives of social organizations in society, for example, union organizations such as the Union of Youth or the Union of Women. It also included experts from research institutes. Members of the commission thus had an opportunity to discuss issues directly with the government and party representatives and with representatives of other organizations. The progressive policy stance of Šráček and many of his colleagues gained the support of parliament (thanks to Adam), the Ministry of Health and its minister, and most members of the Czech and Slovak Union of Women. As Wolchik noted (Reference Wolchik, Sodaro and Wolchik1983, 123), similar opinions and personal acquaintances were more important factors in the formation of coalitions than disciplinary training or institutional affiliation.

The writings of psychologists and gynecologists (both for and against legal abortion) used the same arguments and vocabulary as those found in the documents of the official regime. The emphasis was placed on the collective, not the individual. It is not clear whether the experts adjusted their ideas to comply more with communist ideology, or whether the diction stemmed from their scientific orientation (science was defined in very positivist and quantitative terms in this period). But what is important is that this style of writing left little room in which to question the well-being of the woman, let alone to articulate any particular women's interests. Gynecologists spoke from a position of authority and knowledge, whereas women asking for an abortion were to be judged by a commission, educated, and helped.

Abortion was construed in contemporary texts as an issue that was solely the concern of women (as was the entire area of child care): a woman filed a request, appeared before an abortion committee, was duly “advised” by the committee, and paid a fee. The man's responsibility for reproductive behavior was thus minimized (see also Heitlinger Reference Heitlinger1987, 165). Nonetheless, women were not considered as subjects responsible enough to decide for themselves. Demanding an abortion was still seen as “a display of egoism, light-mindedness and misunderstanding of life” (Radvanová, Nezkusil, and Novotný Reference Radvanová, Nezkusil and Novotný1957). Because women might abuse the legalization and ignore the health risks still associated with abortion, there had to be some control mechanism that could judge the legitimacy of their demand and limit the total number of abortions being performed. This mechanism was exercised through the practices of abortion commissions, through the regulations and notices that the Ministry of Health issued concerning the decision making of these commissions, and through the education of women with articles published in popular journals and by their gynecologists. Here, health-care staff played the role of gatekeepers exercising control over women (see, e.g., Smith Reference Smith2003, 65).

The purpose of abortion commissions was not only to make decisions about abortion, but also to gather information about the women who underwent abortions (together with statistical monitoring). The commissions reported to the State Population Commission. The information was thus used to generate knowledge that could then be directly or indirectly employed in the assertion of power. The abortion commissions were more than just advisory bodies offering women assistance and support; they had the power to make the final decision about the reproductive rights of each individual woman. Moreover, the commissions were directly linked to the political bodies of the state, who retained the power to influence how many abortions were permitted and the conditions under which permission was granted. Abortion commissions occupied an ideal position; they were able to obtain very personal, intimate information from citizens and could also use this information to design policies or to take more repressive political actions.

The State Population Commission, the abortion commissions, the rules issued by the Ministry of Health, the practices of the hospital staff and gynecologists, and the information and propaganda in the media together comprised the instruments of governmentality: “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculation and tactics” of government (Foucault Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991, 102), underpinned by a specific political rationality and expert knowledge about women's bodies and reproduction.

HEALTHY WOMEN, HEALTHY POPULATION

In the political reasoning of the socialist state, women's bodies were construed as material, a resource not just for economic production but also for the reproduction of the population. Emphasis was placed on the functional quality of this building material, that is, on the reproductive health of women. The legalization of abortion was, from the beginning, interpreted as a pro-population measure: The reproductive health of women would be saved by hospital-performed abortions, and these women would be able to have children later.

When the first (1957) and second (1986) acts on abortion were adopted (the second abolished the abortion commissions) and when other orders and regulations were formulated, the primary framings employed in the debates related to health. Health reasons were used as an argument first for legalizing abortion (abortions were brought under the control of health-care facilities), then also for their restriction (even abortions carried out by doctors put women's health at risk and, therefore, should not be granted simply upon a woman's request), and eventually even for completely free access in 1986 (experts discovered that abortions performed early in pregnancy are less of a risk to a woman's reproductive health, and so the process had to be accelerated). But even health was construed in a specific, totalitarian way; many of the arguments were unsubstantiated by any objective scientific findings or research, and validation of results was limited by the closed system of the state-socialist regime.

One of the effects of the expert discourses was the creation of a definition of a “healthy” mother (and her “healthy” child). The politics of abortion then comprised the technologies not only of domination, but also of the self. State-initiated norms were directed at individuals through the hegemonic discourses of power/knowledge; state power was thus embodied in mental and physical restrictions and regulations (see Ludwig and Wohl Reference Ludwig and Wohl2009). Ideally, women were expected to govern themselves (and their bodies) so that they would reproduce and become mothers in order to ensure a healthy and abundant population. They were supposed to view their own bodies as a reproductive instrument, as subject to medical oversight and intervention, or as an object to which knowledge is applied.

According to government texts and expert articles from the 1960s–80s, the ideal reproductive age had an upper age limit of 35 (or 39) and started at 18. Women were to have no fewer than two children, but no more than four or five. Children were expected to be born into a two-parent heterosexual family and raised in satisfactory socioeconomic conditions. The children were to be white (Roma minority women were encouraged to have abortions, and the abortion commissions were more willing to accommodate their requests for an abortion) (see Motejl Reference Motejl2005). In keeping with the aim of producing ideal children, women were encouraged and sometimes even forced to have an abortion if defects were detected in the fetus.

THE CASE OF PRENATAL SCREENING

A preoccupation with population quality emerged in Czechoslovakia with developments in the field of scientific knowledge on genetics. It replaced the concern with population size that had predominated in the 1950s and 1960s. Genetics occupied a very important role in the thinking of demographers, gynecologists, and obstetricians. For demographers, the target was to have a “quality population,” and genetics were seen as a scientific means to achieve this aim (see Černý Reference Černý1971; Dejmek Reference Dejmek1972). For gynecologists and obstetricians, the aim was to minimize the rates of perinatal mortality (Fajfr Reference Fajfr1964). Prenatal screening methods (and abortion if prenatal defects were detected) were used as a tool in both of these cases: in order to improve the genotype of the population and in order to minimize the number of children who would be born with a defect incompatible with life, thus negatively influencing the statistics of perinatal mortality. As statistics on the incidence of perinatal mortality were considered to be important criteria for judging the quality of health care, they also became an important political issue, involving cross-national comparisons (Heitlinger Reference Heitlinger1987, 213).

The history of prenatal screening in Czechoslovakia started in the 1970s and was first used for families with a risk of spina bifida. In the course of the 1980s, the range of screening methods was significantly expanded. If a defect was detected, the woman was advised to undergo an abortion for health reasons, as is indicated, for instance, in the Memorandum to Act No. 66/1986 Coll. on the artificial interruption of pregnancy: “Thanks to developments in genetic counselling early detection is possible. As a consequence, the birth of children with defects, for whom society would have to provide long-term care, is consequently being prevented. Abortion is preferred in these cases.” In addition to extensive prenatal screening, there were other methods used to create a healthy population: reducing the number of sex-related genetic diseases through prenatal sex-selection methods; controlling the fertility of people with genetically transmitted deceases; restricting the fertility of older women; and monitoring the transmission of genes associated with genetic diseases, advising abortion if the gene was transmitted (Černý Reference Černý1971, 118).

The long list of health problems justifying an abortion, combined with the pressure exerted by doctors and other hospital staff on women to have an abortion when a problem seemed to fit this list, were one instrument of governmentality aimed at the construction of a healthy productive and reproductive population. These regulatory and disciplinary instruments took the form not only of technologies of government applied from without but also of self-disciplinary technologies applied from within. Undergoing all the available prenatal tests was required in order for women to qualify for entitlement to family and child-care allowances, and taking these tests was also considered the most normal and rational thing to do. In the Czech Republic today, these tendencies persist in the still-universal application of prenatal examinations and in the subtle pressure put on pregnant women by health-care staff to undergo an abortion if the results indicate the presence of any defects (as shown, for example, by Hasmanová Marhánková Reference Hasmanová Marhánková2008).

THE CASE OF ROMA WOMEN

As has been demonstrated in a number of studies (Final Opinion of the Defender of Public Rights [Motejl 2005]; Charta 77: documents no. 23/1978 and 3/1990 [Císařovská and Prečan Reference Císařovská and Prečan2007]; Body and Soul [Center for Reproductive Rights 2003]), between the 1970s and 1980s, there was an attempt in socialist Czechoslovakia to use reproductive policy to influence the ethnic composition of the population and to judge some ethnicities as being of lower quality than others. This aim was intimated at the level of the central government. In Working with the Gypsy Population, a 1976 manual drawn up by the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the following sentence is found in a chapter entitled “Health Education Care for Gypsy Citizens”: “That is why it is necessary to make use of all possible means so that parents understand the purpose of planned parenthood, so that they try to regulate fertility, and also so that they raise their children as healthy, happy citizens of benefit to society” (Motejl Reference Motejl2005, 46).

The pressure to limit Roma fertility is more evident, however, in reports of the National Committees based on fieldwork in Roma settlements. All of them were concerned with the “undesirable growth of Tzigan families,” and they also saw the most important problem to be the “unplanned parenthood that results in a low-quality population, when children with mental defects are born” (Motejl Reference Motejl2005, 47). An analysis of these reports also shows that the abortion commissions did not take the same approach to Roma women as to majority women: “[W]hen demanding an abortion, Tzigan women are prioritised” (Report from the National Committee of Southern Moravia district, quoted in Motejl Reference Motejl2005, 47). According to a report by the National Committee of the South Bohemia district dated July 6, 1972, “the [Roma] women asking for an abortion are granted artificial termination quite willingly and almost free of charge” (Motejl Reference Motejl2005, 47).

Another instrument used with the aim of controlling the population's ethnic composition was financial subsidies granted to women who decided to undergo sterilization (in 1973 this benefit equaled 2,000 Czechoslovak crowns, and was increased in 1988 to up to 10,000 Czk, the average gross monthly income being 3,095 Czk, according to the Czech Statistical Office), or even sterilization performed without the woman's consent or with consent obtained through threats and as a result of incomplete information. Repeated attempts were also made to tailor family policies toward promoting the ideal of the two/three-child family. This was done, for instance, by scaling child allowances and by focusing on support for the first three children in the family: “Population at any price might not be a profit to society. If we are concerned also with the quality of the population, then support for society should focus on the first three children, and end with the fifth child. Society should provide support for additional children only if there are all the guarantees of a good and universal education” (Sojka Reference Sojka1966, 6).

Throughout the period of state socialism in Czechoslovakia, governing bodies and institutions devoted considerable effort to managing and influencing Roma reproductive behavior. This group, constructed on the basis of race, was assigned a number of negative characteristics: alcoholism, promiscuity, a lack of interest in education and work, abuse of the welfare system, and poor health. The solution was seen to lie in the management of the population. When the strategies and technologies used in the first period (such as the dispersion of families across the territory and the (re)education of Roma children in foster-care institutions) proved to be ineffective, more scientific methods were to be used: genetics, fertility control, and demographic policy.

ABORTION AND SOCIALIST GOVERNMENTALITY

Analysis of the politics of abortion and prenatal screening, specifically with regard to women of Roma ethnicity, shows how biopower (accompanied by explicit state racism; see Foucault Reference Foucault2003b) pervaded power relations inside state-socialist Czechoslovakia. The example of abortion illustrates how socialism took up, developed, and modified biopower to its own end, and how the mechanism of biopower functioned in practice in socialist Czechoslovakia between the 1950s and 1980s. Women as a group did not have an opportunity to participate in decisions on these policies.

The exercise of biopower, according to Foucault, is made possible because of the existence of an ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, and calculations and tactics that he called governmentality (Foucault Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991, 102). The reproductive behavior of families was influenced by knowledge, instruments of public policy, and disciplinatory mechanisms, together constituting a governmentality through which the selves and the bodies of subjects were managed. This governmentality was based on a specific knowledge-power complex and reinforced that knowledge-power base itself.

From this analysis of the abortion issue in Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989, it is possible to conclude that a specific form of socialist governmentality existed in the state-socialist regime. It was represented by the political rationality that determined social practices and, in effect, constituted the totalitarian communist state. The rationality behind this type of governmentality was geared toward maximizing economic production, represented by heavy industry, and reproduction, manifested as (healthy and quality) population growth. This rationality was embodied in the effort to exert centralized control over the reproductive fates of women. Legislative documents, legal regulations, practices of the abortion committees, and, in certain circumstances, even medical procedures were the techniques and strategies by which socialist governmentality was asserted in this area. The pervasiveness of this governmentality was amplified by a special instrument in this system of power: the secret police—an absolute instrument used to collect information and generate knowledge about the population and to produce exact statistics. This was possible because of the absence of any protection of privacy and the existence of a powerful, coercive apparatus of the state.

In this perspective, the governmentality theory of Foucault proves to be very suitable for analyzing state-socialist systems. The analysis in this article shows how government was directly applied to the (female) body through abortion measures and practices. The female subjectivity created by this type of governmentality led women to manage their roles in both the productive and reproductive spheres and assume responsibility for the creation of a healthy population constituting a governable labor force. By reproducing these norms of subjectivity, women essentially facilitated the reproduction of the given system—though individually they, in many cases, perceived the regulations and practices of abortion and, more generally, reproduction as aggressive interference by a higher power—the state—in their lives.

The use of the instruments of governmentality in state-socialist Czechoslovakia was particularly systematic and extensive and was often accompanied by forms of disciplinary and repressive power. It was legitimized by ideas very similar to the ones cited in liberal settings—drawn from the same Enlightenment tradition that valorized science and often used it as an instrument of domination. In the state-socialist regime, the logic of the connection among biopower, governmentality, scientific expertise, and political power is easily observed and analyzed. The role of experts was unique to the centrally planned totalitarian societies, as we saw in the example of the State Population Commission. Expert power was exercised through political structures and vice versa. Experts created a discourse that gave legitimacy to the instruments of governmentality, and expert knowledge was used to rationalize the government's exercise of power. The study of governmentality in the state-socialist context thus enriches the Foucauldian concept of governmentality by showing the role of expert power in the creation and functioning of governmentality.