I imagine it was. Mom is fine now and all the pain and suffering she went through made her one fierce lady. I have rarely met someone as strong and determined as her. I would not be who I am today without her as an awesome role model.

Yes, I think in theory communism was fine with giving women the right to chose, but local factors (religion, which despite eradication attempts, survived more or less underground in some places, economy, population) further complicated the situation. As I said somewhere else, my mom had unprecedented access to higher…

Thank you. I’ll add it to my reading list. I look forward to reading it. 

Yes, I think it was. As I said elsewhere, I have yet to research how things were in Bulgaria or Hungary during the period. Romania had Ceausescu and Poland had Catholicism, so the two heavily factored in.

Thank you. Let’s all hope that stories like my mother’s and grandmother’s will always remain just cautionary tales and never become reality again.

Yes, I imagine that countries like the Soviet Union, with a large population, would not have an issue with natality, nor the obsessive need to increase it by forcing women into giving birth. I’m curious how it was in Bulgaria or Hungary, both fairly small countries.

Yes, forced-birthers is what they actually are! You are completely right and I came across the term before, but it just didn’t come up when needed (one of the disadvantages of being a non-native English speaker is that I have moments when I simply cannot recall a word, the simplest really, but it refuses to surface).

And heart-breaking. And nowadays, with GOP’s increasing efforts against women’s reproductive rights, it is chill-inducing as well.

To be honest, no one I know, luckily :). But listening to the anti-choice discourse on abortion, I can totally believe that there are people who would. So I was parroting their speeches, but I guess my bitterness killed the irony.

Yes, it was in the early ‘80s, so Ceausescu’s regime. I mean, in other respects, communism was not totally awful for women (equal access to education, jobs, etc.), but when it came to reproductive rights, it was disastrous. It probably was mostly Ceausescu’s fault because he wanted to artificially force an increase in…

And speaking of the former communist block, please watch “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” if you haven’t already. My mother had two illegal abortions (one self-inflicted) in communist Romania and I grew up learning from her horror stories. And no, she did not become pregnant because she wanted to (birth control was…

Do you think he even knows what the Congress does? I have a feeling he thinks the Congress will be some kind of personal posse, his fawning courtiers or something like that.

Well, mansplaining is a made-up word, and look how useful it has been. So why not misogynizing? I thought about misogyny and proselytize and they just seemed to work well together.

Thank you! Not being a native English speaker, I often make up words when I feel like English should have them. My advisor used to go crazy every time. Feel free to add it to your vocab, I’m happy someone appreciates my “neologisms” :).

And I don’t know whether I should be angry or sad about it..... Wait, I know: ANGRY!

It reminds me of that “what’s-her-name-she-wouldn’t-marry-gay couples” woman. Her multiple marriages were proof of the sanctity of marriage; gay marriages, on the other hand, not so much. I wonder if she had been more malleable if the gay couples would have been on their third or fourth marriage.

My mom, also an engineer from a former Soviet country, also used to think just like that. I’m happy to say that I learned to be strong from her, but she learned feminism from me. Needless to say, she no longer thinks like that anymore.

I just made a similar comment upstream, but less coherently. I totally agree: there are many women just like that, unfortunately, and not all of them are old.

There is also the type of woman who “out-misogynizes” (have a just made up a new word? yay for me) the misogynists because she had it tough in her career so now that she is well-established, she has the impression that younger women have it easier than she had. And she cannot stand that, so she does her best to make…

Well, she was speaking from her own experience. What better proof of cognitive decline can you ask for? She is voting for Trump, after all :)