This project brings ongoing revision of achievements and falls of genetics into analytical lens of reproductive injustice – institutionalized and legitimized coercion to give birth and not to give birth. I retell the history of genetics to explain the ambivalence of scientific knowledge about human heredity as formed by two interrelated and mutually contested flows, multiple and obviously never-ending attempts to find the medical routs to human perfection on the one hand, and various strategies targeted with negating the idea of perfection with the help of interdisciplinary revision of the scientific progress in genetics on the other. In the global history of medicine, the ambivalence of progress in genetics challenges previously established approaches to interpreting the impact of medical science on population politics. Historicizing genetics in CEE countries is one of the fundamental prerequisites for developing this narration.

The CEE countries have gone through different historical moments in which the strengthening of their geopolitical role has brought medical expertise, including genetics, into line with the global security agenda. After WWI, and the increased role in preventing pandemics, prominent eugenicists in their respective nation states, contributed to the medicalization of particular social groups as carriers of infectious diseases. CEE eugenicists participated in preparing the UNESCO Statements on Race in the early 1950s, and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, socialist geneticists immediately intervened in the agenda of global population policy aimed at the survival of humanity in the face of looming nuclear catastrophe. The collapse of the socialism resulted in the liberalization of medicine, including the engagement of post-socialist medical genetics with the global fertility market. The contemporary multiplicity of reproductive injustice in CEE countries calls for such historicization. This project solves this task.