The Marxist case for abortion

Rethinking the imagination of bodies in Soviet Marxism

Abstract

This article proposes to rearticulate a pro-abortion Marxism to offer an alternative to current debates that posit individual rights versus anti-abortion advocacy. The 2022 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) raises the specter of the consolidation of the anti-abortionist movement in Eastern European countries, which are strongly influenced culturally and politically by the North American country. To advance a psychoanalytic Marxist critique, I concentrate not only on a theoretical addressing of individualism but also on a dialectical interpretation of capitalism. I make two arguments here. First, that while US social constructionism saw bodies as formed from a naturally given material, productivist bodies were a vehicle for a Soviet Marxist ideology that aimed to emancipate the entirety of humanity. Second, I trace an ideological shift in Romanian cinema from a Marxist body to a politics of natality, which provided the basis for the 1966 banning of abortion in that country. While I criticize Soviet productivism as a theory that sought to undermine capitalism (like Slavoj Žižek (2014), I see such materialization as the wrong Marxism), I show the relevance of a historical argument for a Marxist pro-abortion politics.