Legalization of abortion in the Soviet Union

Simone de Beauvoir treats the Soviet Union’s temporary legalization of abortion as a revealing but limited change in women’s reproductive rights. The policy briefly gave legal recognition to abortion, but its reversal in 1936 demonstrates that such recognition could be withdrawn when state priorities shifted. In her account, reproductive autonomy is inseparable from women’s freedom to shape their lives, yet neither socialist policy nor formal legal change guarantees that freedom on its own.

A temporary legal change

Abortion was officially recognized in the Soviet Union for a short time before 1936. De Beauvoir places this interval alongside a similar pre-Nazi period in Germany, contrasting both with the continuing practice of abortion despite restrictive religious and legal rules. The comparison distinguishes formal recognition from the realities of reproductive life: a state may permit abortion for a period, but legal permission is neither permanent nor sufficient to settle the larger question of women’s control over fertility.

Reproduction, work, and freedom

The episode belongs to de Beauvoir’s argument that women’s social position is shaped by the conjunction of reproductive burdens and economic conditions. She describes unregulated fertility as a force that has historically confined women to domestic labor, while access to work and control over reproduction can help women gain greater command of their own lives. In that framework, the Soviet policy matters not simply as a legal measure but as part of the political organization of reproduction.

De Beauvoir also resists reducing emancipation to employment or to a single economic formula. Women’s reproductive role cannot simply be treated as a job, and the state’s changing family policies expose the tension between production needs and demands for population growth. A policy recognizing abortion therefore does not, by itself, establish equality: the conditions under which women bear and raise children, and the degree to which they can decide whether to do so, remain central.

Reversal and the limits of state solutions

The 1936 reversal makes the episode especially significant in her account. De Beauvoir argues that even a society claiming socialist principles may subordinate women when family policy is altered to meet the state’s immediate needs. She invokes the Soviet Union’s repeated shifts in family policy to show that abolishing or reorganizing the family cannot automatically end women’s oppression; women may remain subject to male power even when their lives are directly tied to the state.

The brief recognition of abortion thus stands as neither a complete emancipation nor a trivial reform. Its reversal reveals how quickly reproductive rights can yield to political priorities, and why de Beauvoir measures women’s freedom by their concrete ability to act and choose rather than by the promises of an institution or ideology.