Sometimes the demands of pro-life involvement in Canada are such that I barely pay attention to what is going on in other areas of the world. Along with countless others, I am sure, I have only half paid attention to the policies of “perestroika” and “glasnost” advocated by Soviet leader Gorbachev. My interest is quickly aroused, however, when other events and issues are later linked with abortion and at that point I regret not paying more attention in the first place.
Perestroika and abortion were linked in a recent article in Soviet News and Views, which is published by the USSR Embassy in Ottawa. The writer, Larisa Kuznetsova, appeals for perestroika to have some effects on the lives of Russian women. Many of them, she says, have become a “third sex,” expected to epitomize “the inevitable superwoman blend of job, family, domestic and maternal roles.” She blames a “flourishing patriarchal society” for this trend: it puts women into the work force yet keeps them out of positions of political power.
Grass always looks greener from the other side of the fence, of course, and I am sure there are any number of Interim readers who could illustrate vividly for Kuznetsova the ways in which women’s lives are not necessarily improved when society becomes obsessed with stamping out patriarchy.
The cruelest abortions system
The Soviet Union has “the world’s cruelest abortion system,” Kuznetsova writes. “The main thing is to get in the abortion queue in time, and not to shudder when you climb on to the obstetrician’s execution block. We, who invented that third sex, paradoxically lead the world in abortions, accounting for one in every four. This is six to ten times the number of industrialized countries. And the statistic ignores the back-street abortions which are also pretty common.”
“The blame falls less on our health service than on our image of the woman as an asexual being. In this country the aspect of culture that governs, ennobles and humanizes male-female relations is almost gone.
“Premature babies more often than not die. The figure is incredible for a developed country – 26 infant deaths in every thousand births. It would be even higher, but for our medical statistics not classifying a baby weighing one kilogram as a newborn child.”
Later on, she notes, “We are endlessly straining the woman’s maternal feeling, as if to test its strength. No wonder we have women who abandon their newborn babies in maternity homes, no wonder we have more and more women alcoholics, for whom babies are just a passing whim.”
Kuzentsova does not explain how she thinks this appalling situation came to be. Is it because the economic situation for families is terrible, and the social systems to help women needing care for children inadequate? It certainly is not because of a radical feminist movement demanding “choice,” Kuznetsova says that there is no “really serious women’s movement’ in the Soviet Union. All she refers to is a lack of access to contraception as a factor in the number of pregnancies. If I could talk to her, I would warn her not to look to the West as a model of perfection in this respect. Widespread use of contraception does not reduce the abortion rate and it brings with it other hazards such as infertility and increased rates of sexually transmitted diseases. I would urge her to read Germain Greer’s indictment of contraception in Sex and Destiny to discover, from a feminist perspective, how contraception destroys women’s health.
The phenomenon of a third sex, women who deny their femaleness in order to cope in a society hostile to children, is not confined to the Soviet Union. It is hard to imagine how social reforms in that country could make the abortion situation even worse but if Kuznetsova thinks that Western style radical feminism is the answer, she is sadly misinformed.
