Joanna Mishtal, "The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland" (Ohio UP, 2015)
In the fall of 2020, Poland\u2019s Constitutional Tribunal decreed that the country\u2019s near-total ban on abortion was too liberal; henceforth, pregnancies could be terminated only in cases of rape, incest, or imminent threat to the mother\u2019s life. The court\u2019s decision triggered a nationwide Women\u2019s Strike, whose social mobilization galvanized reproductive rights advocacy across Europe.\nIn the wake of the Polish mass protests, and in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, now is a crucial moment to re-visit anthropologist Joanna Mishtal\u2019s ground-breaking book\xa0The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland\xa0(Ohio University Press, 2015). Mishtal recast the decades since communism\u2019s collapse as a time of joint Church-State war on reproductive rights, as well as feminism, which was painted as either a communist legacy or a foreign import.\xa0The Politics of Morality\xa0examines the contradiction between an emerging democracy on the one hand, and a declining tolerance for women\u2019s rights and political and religious pluralism on the other. Surveillance, control, and abuse of power are persistent themes in this revealing ethnography, which has had an enormous scholarly impact in the study of gender and religion & politics in Eastern Europe, but carries powerful lessons far beyond its immediate field.\nPiotr H. Kosicki\xa0is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of\xa0Catholics on the Barricades\xa0(Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of\xa0Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century\xa0(with Wolfram Kaiser).\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law