Russian ‘crusade’ threat to abortion as contraception

WOMEN of all ages used to fill gynaecologist Lyubov Yerofeyeva’s Soviet state clinic, lined up for abortion. “It was more common to take sick days for an abortion than for a cold in those days,” she said.

Two decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse, wider availability of contraception and a resurgence of religion have reduced the numbers of abortions overall, but termination remains the top method of birth control in Russia.

Its abortion rate – 1.3 million, or 73 per 100 births in 2009 – is the world’s highest.

Backed by the Russian Orthodox Church, an influential anti-abortion lobby is driving a moral crusade to tighten abortion law and shift public attitudes portrayed as a legacy of the Soviet era.

Adding to the debate is the Russian government’s effort to reverse a population decline caused by low birth rates and very high death rates. With Russians dying nearly twice as fast as they are born, the United Nations predicts that, by 2050, its population will shrink by almost one-fifth to 116 million.

Women’s rights groups say abortion must remain a choice and decry the church’s intervention. They acknowledge the statistics highlight a problem but suggest it would be better resolved by sex education.

At the heart of the debate is an amendment to Russia’s law that is all but guaranteed to pass in the lower house after it was approved in a critical second of three readings on 21 October.

The law would cap abortions at 12 weeks, impose a waiting period of up to a week from initial consultations and require women more than six weeks’ pregnant to see the embryo on ultrascan, hear its heartbeat and have counselling to determine how to proceed.

“Our two main motives are the fact that Russia is dying out and our religious tradition,” Yelena Mizulina, chair of the family issues committee behind the proposal, said. “Despite the long Communist period, it is seen as murder, as a violation of the Ten Commandments.”

Experts say only migration can plug the demographic black hole, but that is a solution with potentially explosive side effects given Russia’s ethnic tensions.

The Soviet Union was the first country to legalise abortion, in 1920, but Stalin outlawed it in 1936, seeking to boost births, and it was illegal until 1955, two years after his death. Women’s groups point to a surge in deaths from illegal abortions under the ban.

“They should look to history: If a woman doesn’t want to have a baby, she’ll end her pregnancy with a coathanger,” said Ms Yerofeyeva, who has founded a charity to promote sex education.

“Women do not owe the state, they don’t have to give birth like machines,” she said. The only way to reduce abortions is to disabuse women of “stigmas” and “superstitions” handed down from Soviet times, when condoms made in the Eastern Bloc were not only scarce but notoriously thick, uncomfortable and prone to break.

With the arrival of modern methods of contraception in the 1990s, abortion rates fell by almost a third but have since dropped more slowly. Experts say women’s use of the pill remains low, at below 20 per cent.

“Our sexual revolution came 30 years later than in the West and was only for a very small class of women,” gender-studies expert Irina Kosterina said.

Only 10 per cent of Russian women who abort are ending a first pregnancy, she said, adding most have one or two children.