Abortion in Russia’s crosshairs

(Warsaw) Atrophied by decades of demographic crisis, weakened by the ravages of COVID-19 and now bruised by losses on the front in Ukraine, Russia is launching a pronatalist crusade, with a new enemy: abortion.

In line with Vladimir Putin’s increasingly conservative doctrine, a multitude of Russian regions began this winter to restrict access to abortion in private clinics. They also made emergency contraceptives more difficult to obtain.

Health authorities, for their part, have asked doctors in public establishments to do everything they can to dissuade women from using it.

While Bolshevik Russia was the first country in the world to decriminalize abortion in 1920, the Kremlin is moving step by step closer to the anti-abortion line supported by the Orthodox Church.

Mr. Putin has made himself the apostle of large families in the name of “traditional” and patriotic values, mixing morality and demographic problems to justify his positions, while presenting Russia as the counterweight to a decadent West because it is feminist and tolerant. towards LGBT+.

The Russian president certainly said Thursday that he was opposed to the ban on abortion, but he insisted that they were against the interest of a country: “The State has an interest in ensuring that the demographic problem is resolved of itself if women decide, after learning that they are pregnant, to preserve the life of the child.

Russia’s demographic trajectory has been catastrophic since the end of the Soviet era. If the right to abortion has never been seriously questioned until now, voices in favor of restrictions are increasingly audible, particularly since the start of the Russian assault on Ukraine in February 2022.

“When a country is at war, it is generally accompanied by these types of measures,” Leda Garina, a Russian feminist activist who lives in exile in Georgia, told AFP.

For her, it’s about saying: “Give birth to more soldiers.”

Vladimir Putin, who is seeking a new term in March 2024, has also made the defense of conservative family values ​​a major axis of his policy.

For years, the Kremlin has been increasing pronatalist financial incentives. This policy has taken on new meaning since the war.

“They consider it a question of national survival,” underlines political scientist Tatiana Stanovaïa.

She also believes that Mr. Putin considers any opposition to his societal positions as an illustration of a Western Russophobic plot. “Convincing a woman to have an abortion is a way to aggravate Russia’s demographic problem: it’s the West’s plan,” she explains.

Magic wand

The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill, urged the authorities in October to restrict abortions, assuring that the population would then increase as if by the “wave of a magic wand”.

In public clinics, there are already consultations intended to dissuade women from abortion, but new recommendations from the Ministry of Health recommend a more muscular strategy.

According to prominent demographer Viktoria Sakievich, hospitals must now “stop them, put pressure on [les femmes]scare them.”

In some regions, there are financial bonuses for doctors who manage to convince a patient not to have an abortion.

Since most women having abortions in Russia are already financially deprived mothers, Mr. Sakievitch fears that a repressive policy could lead to the emergence of a dangerous black market in abortion pills, or even, ultimately, to clandestine surgical interventions.

This policy of restriction is not unanimous even in Mr. Putin’s entourage. Thus, Valentina Matvienko, the speaker of the upper house of Parliament, warned that banning abortion would have “tragic consequences”.

For political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, the Russian authorities are mistaken in directing their pronatalist crusade towards women. “They should fight against early male mortality, the main cause of population decline, instead of trying to encourage women to have more children.”

But the subject is taboo at a time when the Kremlin is sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers onto the battlefield.

Therefore, observers fear that the government will decide to gradually tighten the screws on abortion, for example by removing it from care accessible under health insurance.

For Sergei Zakharov, demographer at the University of Strasbourg in France, this approach is doomed to failure: “It would be like Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy. […] It never worked.”