The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece (review)

An ambitious undertaking, Alexandra Halkias' The Empty Cradle of Democracy reveals much about the entanglements of gender, sexuality and nationalism as she explores the practice of and discourses that surround abortion in modern Greece. By official estimates, Greece has one of the highest rates of abortion worldwide. At the same time, Greece faces a rapidly declining birth rate. This paradox has fueled something closely akin to a panic among state and church officials. Halkias sets out to examine this paradox.

Truly, this is a book about many things – the contradictions, tensions and paradoxes that electrify the modern landscape of Greece and Greekness, bodies and reproduction, personhood and the liberal democratic state, contemporary femininity and the good Greek woman. Themes of sex and love, intimacy and loss, responsibility and blame, shame and moral transgression, race and patriotism are woven together as Halkias lays a series of conceptual maps that parse out the complex and contradictory meanings of abortion across different registers. Halkias has gathered an extensive range of materials for analysis: 120 in-depth interviews with women who report having had more than two abortions: interviews with doctors, nursing personnel and midwives; observation of a state-sponsored abortion clinic as well as private medical facilities; and hundreds of public documents from editorials to newspaper articles on the subject. With rich detail and analytical acuity, Halkias threads together the different stories that are told about abortion, demonstrating how abortion is a field of power where gender subjects are produced, where ethnic anxieties are inflamed, where the tensions between modernity and tradition play out, and a discourse of nation building is fortified. In doing so, Halkias builds a persuasive case for the centrality of women's bodies and reproductive trajectories to nation-building efforts and the construction of a collective national identity. For feminist readers, this will be a familiar tale. For decades feminist scholars have detailed the very public, contentious and sometimes violent struggle for control of women's reproduction. Yet, Halkias provides fresh insight as she gives equal consideration to the specificities of one "geo-political" site and the broader currents of state-building projects in the contexts of "globalizing high modernity" and modern gender and sexual regimes.

Halkias explores abortion at two levels: its status as Greece struggles to gain greater presence in the European Union and at the far more personal level as women navigate their intimate relationships with men. Halkias makes visible the interpretive frames that are brought to bear in the decision to have multiple abortions. The women's narratives are intense as the subtext of loss and longing are palpable. Yet Halkias also demonstrates how sex operates as a site of resistance against modernity as these women assert their own agency in a rapidly changing social, emotional and political context. Her analysis reveals to us once again that "the personal is political."

The chapters move easily between different materials for analysis. Early chapters set the historical and political stage, later chapters spotlight the interview material. One chapter explores the subject of birth control, uncovering a series of clever connections between the meaning of birth control use and nationalism. Halkias shows how condom use is seen as a disruption to spontaneity, freedom and passion, qualities understood to be central to the very sense of being Greek. Halkias also demonstrates how women use a narrative template deployed in nationalist rhetoric about foreign invasion to the body politic as they talk about their refusal to ingest the pill. Halkias shines in these moments when she reveals unlikely connections and remains grounded in the rich narrative materials she carefully and reflexively collected. However, there are distinct moments where Halkias seems to be swept away by an overly-theoretical impulse. Portions of her analysis are so steeped in the language of post-structuralism that it compromises her commitment to a reflexive and feminist mode of inquiry by creating a disjuncture between analytical framings and the...