Abstract:

The fertility rate has been considerably high in most regions of Central Asia compared to other former Soviet republics despite a history of Central Asian women exercising their reproductive choices, including freely receiving abortion services. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reproductive rights of Central Asian women have been adversely affected by revived social traditions, the privatization of health service providers, the cost and scarcity of public health resources, changing government fertility regulation, and the decline of public childcare services, increasing childcare responsibilities.

In addition, CA governments have actively sought to direct women’s reproductive choices through the adoption and implementation of policies to control fertility, but these policies differ. The government of Tajikistan calls on families/couples to reduce fertility to mitigate (generational) poverty and improve livelihood. The government of Uzbekistan has taken a more severe direction to lower birth rates. According to the Sexual Rights initiative in 2008, the country introduced "compulsory sterilizations" in 2002 to control women's births. Compulsory application of intrauterine devices (IUD) and hysterectomy are commonly found among Uzbekistani women at the age of 25 and younger who have two children. In contrast, the government of Kazakhstan, where population aging has begun, has pursued a policy to increase fertility levels by encouraging women to bear more children (Rani, et al. 2006). While there is some research on women’s reproductive health in Central Asia, little attention has been paid to the issue of women’s reproductive choices and rights.

This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature by, first, analyzing governments' actions and strategies to control births in five countries of post-Soviet Central Asia: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. We then focus on two countries with the most recent Demographic Health Surveys and contrasting policies, Tajikistan (2017) and Kyrgyzstan (2012), to examine women's fertility preferences and decisions in the context of the country policies, drawing on the concept of "sense of entitlement" proposed by Petchesky and Judd (1998) to "illuminate the subjective component of 'rights' – what women feel entitled to (p. 187)." Finally, we use the DHS data to examine services to which women have access, evaluating the ways that reproductive preferences and outcomes vary with policy-related access to services and other factors, including social norms and household structure.