Kateryna Ruban

Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

September 2024 - May 2025
Supported by HURI with the Jaroslaw and Nadia Mihaychuk Fellowship Fund

 

HURI Research Project

Abortion, Emancipation, and Autonomy: OBGYN Nina Holopatiuk and the History of Abortion in Ukraine

This book project looks at the microhistory of a provincial hospital in postwar Transcarpathia and Dr. Nina Holopatiuk who worked there to explore the role of abortion in female emancipation in 20th century Ukraine. At the center of this story are doctors for whom abortion was a matter of professional autonomy and their relationship with the Soviet state, as they insisted that women had the right to decide their own maternity. How was this autonomy possible, even during Stalinism, when access to abortion was severely restricted and Soviet public healthcare was supposed to be fully controlled from above? To answer this question, this project looks at public debates on abortion that started in the 1910s, the origins of Ukrainian public healthcare after 1917, and at how the figure of a Soviet doctor, both a professional and political authority, appeared in the postwar period. The most important primary source for this study is a memoir written by obstetrician-gynecologist Nina Holopatiuk who worked in the Irshava hospital and performed abortions — often beyond the legal limits — and had an abortion herself. The microhistory of the Irshava hospital illustrates how women were often able to maneuver within official policies and gain access to limited tools to control their own reproduction. When revising the dissertation into a book manuscript, Dr. Ruban aims to integrate this study into the history of Ukrainian public healthcare and Ukrainian history in general, abandoning her earlier framework of a Soviet history of abortion.

Biography

Dr. Kateryna Ruban is a Ukrainian historian who specializes in Ukrainian and Soviet history with an emphasis on women’s history and the history of abortion. In September 2022, she received a PhD from New York University. Kateryna holds master’s degrees in history from Central European University and in cultural studies from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Before coming to the US, she was a part of the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv. One of her parallel interests is contemporary Ukrainian art and cinema, and she has organized screenings and artist talks at universities and galleries in the US and Europe. In 2023, Kateryna was a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University. In 2024, she was a fellow at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at University of Vienna and taught a course on Ukrainian history at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. During her Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Fellowship at HURI, she is turning her dissertation into a book. Kateryna also continues her research on Ukrainian artists, scholars, and writers that refuse to participate in events alongside Russians since the full-scale invasion as part of a broader demand for decolonization addressed to Western academic and cultural institutions.