Thirty Years in the Making: Attitudes to Abortion among Czechs and Slovaks at the End of the State Socialist Era in Czechoslovakia

Abstract

The text aims to analyze attitudes to abortion at the end of state socialism in Czechoslovakia, trying to see whether thirty plus years of legally obtainable abortion resulted in markedly favorable stance and whether there was any difference in attitudes between persons socialized under different legal regulation of abortion. Results show that the attitudes in the general population were dependent upon the circumstances of pregnancy in a way that indicated some link to the broader historical context of abortion under state socialism, especially where attitudes to “abortion as a mean of birth control” were concerned. Czechoslovaks born in the latter part of the 1940s, in the 1950s, and the first half of the 1960s were found to be more tolerant to abortion than their older and younger counterparts but did not differ among themselves.