Biennial Conference of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health

Kateřina presented a paper titled “Against the obscurantist views from the past. Introducing legal abortion to Czechoslovakia as a means of improving women’s health and their right to decide,” in which she traced the debates that preceded the introduction of abortion law in Czechoslovakia and analyzed the first years of its implementation. She showed how the field of population expertise re-emerged and consolidated in the second half of the 1950s around women’s fertility. She argued that new symbolic framework for the socialist family – including the roles of women and men – was developed, alongside an institutional infrastructure designed to ensure the material preconditions to uphold it.