Catholic Intimacies: Negotiating Contraception in Late Communist Poland
Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemEditorial
Wiley
Fecha
2022-05-08Referencia bibliográfica
KoŚciaŃska, A., Ignaciuk, A. and Chełstowska, A. (2022), Catholic Intimacies: Negotiating Contraception in Late Communist Poland. Journal of Religious History. [https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12861]
Patrocinador
National Science Centre, Poland 2019/33/B/HS3/01068; FWOResumen
The majority of people in Poland self-identified as Catholic throughout the second
half of the twentieth century. Despite the Polish Episcopate’s unanimous rejection
of contraception as immoral and sinful, a considerable proportion of Polish Catholics
utilized family planning techniques and technologies explicitly banned by their
institutional Church. This article uses personal narratives to show how Polish Catholics
negotiated their use of Church-authorized and Church-banned family planning
methods with their lived experiences of faith in a communist state where both abortion
and contraception were legal. We explore the strategies of interpretation,
relativisation, and (selective) rejection through which Catholics who self-identified
as “practising” approached birth control as a social issue and an individual practice
and show how communist secular approaches to birth control contributed to extending
the scope of Catholics’ agency in the realm of reproductive decision making.