The answer is dependent on the decade in which this scenario would have happened. Shortly after the revolution, the People’s Commissariat of Health, in a step to recognize and improve women’s health, legalized abortion in November 1920. The Commissariat noted that the number of abortions occurring each year had continued to grow both in the Soviet Union and in European countries, while adding in their decree “legislation of all countries combats this evil [of abortion] by punishing the woman who chooses to have an abortion and the doctor who makes it” which drove many operations into underground markets where “up to 50 per cent of such woman are infected in the course of operation, and up to 4 per cent of them die.” The Commissariat of Health saw the women who resorted to underground abortions as “victim[s] of mercenary and often ignorant quacks who make a profession of secret operations” and sought to defeat this method of female repression.[1] Doctors were allowed to carry out abortion operations in Soviet hospitals, free of charge, in order to minimize harm to patients. However, midwives and nurses were not allowed to provide abortions, nor were doctors with private practice who held “mercenary aims.” The Soviet Union was the first country to have widespread legalized abortion. Similarly, Soviet women were allowed to divorce husbands and own land around the same time.

Ideas surrounding abortion began to change under Stalin. Stalin began to reverse the traditional Marxist idea of dissolution of the family unit, which earlier Soviet leaders had pushed. Stalin focused on the importance of the family unit with respect to abortions and divorce legislation. He promoted the idea of the “double burden” in which women carried, or their social responsibility to work and raise a family in their household. In 1936, Stalin repealed the decree of legal abortion. Abortions were restricted to “exclusively in those cases when the continuation of pregnancy endangers life or threatens serious injury to the health of the pregnant woman.”[2] With this decree, elective abortions were not allowed to be carried out. Lewis Siegelbaum states that opposition to this legislation “were not based on a woman’s right to control her body but rather on the impossible strains that bearing and raising children would impose on their pursuit of a career, on available living space, and other quotidian concerns,” adding, “The number of officially recorded abortions dropped sharply from 1.9 million in 1935 to 570,000 in 1937, but thereafter began to climb, reaching 755,000 in 1939. Despite criminal liability for performing illegal abortions, the actual number was probably a good deal higher.”[3]

In 1955, the Soviet government lifted this ban on abortion but continued to emphasize prevention of abortion, whether legal or illegal. Just like in 1920, health officials recognized the threat to women’s health that illegal abortions posed. However, the lift on the ban was accompanied by a large pro-natal campaign that the 1920 decree never had, which continued to place the family at the center of society similar to Stalin’s focus on family. The state pushed sexual educational, particularly by warning women that abortions, even in the correct medical setting, were still dangerous operations that could lead to permanent infertility and “lead to irreparable harm by destroying a woman’s chances of becoming a mother.” The idea was pushed that infertility was “linked not only to personal unhappiness but also to family unhappiness and the destruction of marriage.”[4] While elective abortions became legal again, the operations were still stigmatized in the attempt to prevent them for most cases as the state pushed strong family units as the center of social stability.

[1] http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/the-new-woman/the-new-woman-texts/on-the-protection-of-womens-health/

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[2] http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1936-2/abolition-of-legal-abortion/abolition-of-legal-abortion-texts/protection-of-motherhood/

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[3] http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1936-2/abolition-of-legal-abortion/

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[4] http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1956-2/repealing-the-ban-on-abortion/