Preliminary Programme

The deliberate termination of unintended pregnancy was a major social and medical problem that affected demographic trends throughout Yugoslavia (1918 - 1991) to a large extent. Since the 1920s, Yugoslavs chose to have a family with less children, primarily for economic and social reasons. The first step towards the liberalization of abortion was made in 1952 with the adoption of the Regulation on the Execution of the Allowed and the Completion of a Started Abortion. The Regulation set out the indications for the legal termination of pregnancy - medical, moral - ethical (in the case of incest and rape) and socio medical, and specified the persons who were authorized to approve the termination of pregnancy as well as the institutions where abortions should take place. In an attempt to restrain the practice of illegal abortions, but still not ready to change the legislative framework, the authorities took the path of least resistance, putting a pressure on doctors to interpret abortion regulations more flexibly by which the social circumstances of Yugoslavs would be at least partially facilitated. The Family Planning Resolution, passed at the Federal Assembly in April 1969, was an introduction to the complete liberalization of abortion and a kind of a national program that tried to make every child to be born as wanted. The right of parents to decide on the number of children in the family and the gap between childbirths was defined as "one of the basic human rights" which had to be achieved by the use of contraceptives. According to that, a termination of pregnancy was said to be the least desirable form of birth control, which should be resorted to only as a "last resort" when an unintended conception had already occurred.
The national family planning policies managed to decriminalize abortion and, through legalization, allow almost all abortions to be done in gynecological clinics, under optimal medical conditions. Although the Federal Assembly Resolution on Family Planning (1969) established the obligations of society to develop the conditions for acquiring knowledge and to provide the necessary resources for family planning, the results achieved were modest. It turned out that in the modernized Yugoslav society, sex and sexuality were and remained a taboo, and young people, who had already started an intimate relationship, could not obtain adequate knowledge either at school or at home. The number of adolescent pregnancies was increasing year in year out, and abortion remained one of the favored "methods" of family planning. However, despite huge number of abortions, the accurate statistics were missing. According to the incomplete data, the number of abortions reached the approximate number of 350 000 in 1980, which averaged over 900 abortions per 1000 live births. Considering the rate of legal abortions per 1000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, only the Soviet Union was ahead of Yugoslavia, while all other countries had a lower incidence. (Show less)

Recently demonstrated discrepancies between aggregated estimates of the course and pace of fertility decline and the individual experiences of families (eg. Hionidou 2020) calls for investigation of the available sources in the countries where the research on family limitation practices in the course of modernization is scant. This paper aims at providing, describing and analysing the evidence on micro-level fertility regimes in the interwar Poland. The study makes use of the unique and novel dataset compiled from almost 10 000 questionnaires of the fertility survey conducted in 1933 by Polish Institute of Population Issues Research (Polski Instytut Badania Zagadnie? Ludno?ciowych) deposed in the Modern Records Archive in Warsaw (Archiwum Akt Nowych). Each such document contains the information on a family: place and date of birth of spouses, migration, religion, education, occupation and date of their marriage, size of lodging, persons living in lodging, number of children (alive and dead) and their dates of births. What is important the questionnaires give also substantial amount of data on the generation of spouses’ parents, i.e. occupation of the husband’s father, number of husband’s siblings, number of wife’s siblings. This data is first compared in substantial aspects with the national and regional estimates of nuptiality and fertility (ASMFR, TMFR) to assess its credibility. Then, the classical demographic methods (life tables, parity progression ratios, inter-birth intervals etc.) are used to distinguish fertility behaviours among specific cohorts, regional populations and religious denominations, as well as social groups. The working hypothesis is that the intra-rural social disparities in fertility behaviours amplified by the agrarian crisis and Great Depression were overlooked conversely to the quite obvious urban-rural differentials. The study demonstrates non-uniformity of the experience of the fertility decline and its means looking for potential explanations among inheritance rules as well as labour opportunities. (Show less)