LAUSR

and the prevalence of women raising children alone) that make it a particularly instructive example of welfare and demographic policy. The book deals with the experience of “Soviet women struggling to create the best possible family life in difficult postwar conditions under the pronatalist regime, and the medical and legal professionals who tried to improve the welfare of postwar mothers and children” (p. 3), focusing primarily on abortion policy. The Soviet state regulated abortion under the umbrella of Family Law, successive versions of which legalized or criminalized it as a result of contestations between the party apparatchiks, women’s health experts, demographers, and women themselves. Successive versions of the Family Law were also the legal instruments through which the state tried to legislate divorce and parental responsibility, which after World War II was quite deliberately increasingly foisted on women in order to promote unmarried motherhood. Given that this increased responsibility wasn’t offset by investment in either medical, social or economic support, it is little wonder that these policies largely failed to achieve the state’s primary goal—increasing fertility. By using the successive revisions of the Family Law as its scaffolding, Nakachi successfully navigates the various changes in perspective that this analysis requires. But the strategy also causes her to miss opportunities for an in-depth engagement with the gender politics that underpin so much of this history and that could have given the book a greater narrative richness. Still, this is an important work not only for students of Soviet history, but for students of welfare and abortion policy, which is once again on the front pages of our newspapers, making clear that we have yet to learn the lessons that history is offering us.