By tracing the history of abortion politics in Hungary since World War I, this article covers a century of conflict with particular attention to gynecologists’ self-serving professional jockeying and lobbying under very different political regimes. It suggests that nationalism has been a pivotal element of the abortion debates that both government actors and gynecologists have shaped over the last hundred years and argues that abortion rights were differently recognized in eastern and western Europe during the Cold War because of the legacy of mass wartime rapes committed by the Soviet troops in Hungary, among other countries, which determined those countries’ postwar legislation on abortion and reproductive rights. The article introduces the rarely researched contribution of the gynecologist lobby to the debates by examining how they could represent their own interests independently of political regime. Today, Hungary's illiberal regime questions the legitimacy of abortion by normalizing US fundamentalist-Christian discourse because anti-abortion policy fits into its nation-building course.

Based on analysis of newspapers and secondary sources, this article examines the gendered construction of the national imagery of the war between the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in an effort to expand current conceptual understanding of the exclusion experienced by children born of forced marriage inside the LRA. Uganda developed as a militarised and masculine post-colony and yet nation-building for President Museveni involved crafting a national imagery that drew upon development discourses of gender and children to position himself as the benevolent father of the nation. Invoking Veena Das’ ‘figure of the abducted woman’, I argue that the Ugandan government mobilised the figure of the abducted Acholi girl to legitimise both its governance and the war. The article concludes that the resulting narrative provided no legitimate social or political space in the national imagery for the children of the abducted girls.