Moscow - Women of all ages used to fill gynaecologist Lyubov Yerofeyeva's Soviet state clinic, lined up by the dozen for back-to-back abortions. “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 legislation and shift public attitudes that are largely 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 combined with 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 voice outrage that the Church would play a role in shaping Russia's secular laws and say abortion must remain a choice. They acknowledge the statistics point to a public health travesty but suggest the problem would be better resolved by sex education. In 2011 the Russian Parliament passed a law restricting abortion to the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, with an exception up to 22 weeks if the pregnancy was the result of rape. The law also mandated a waiting period of two to seven days before an abortion can be performed, to allow the woman to "reconsider her decision", and requires women over six weeks pregnant to see the embryo on ultrasound, hear its heartbeat and have counselling to determine how to proceed. Abortion advertisements are required to carry health warnings. “Our two main motives are the fact that Russia is dying out and our religious tradition. We cannot forget our faith,” Yelena Mizulina, chair of the family issues committee that fielded the law explained. Russia's sharp demographic crisis, she said, adds to the urgency. “America is not threatened with extinction, it can afford to be more lenient,” Mizulina said. The government has worked hard to foster a baby boom, honoring big families at pomp-filled Kremlin events, offering subsidies to parents with more than one child and even raffling off cars to women who give birth on the national holiday. Experts say only migration can help plug the demographic black hole, but that is a solution with potentially explosive side effects given the country's ethnic tensions. Fear that mostly Muslim migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus will replace a dwindling ethnic Russian populace have helped fuel the Orthodox Church's newly vocal role on abortion and other issues since the demise of the atheist Soviet Union. More than 150 human rights and feminist groups signed a global petition against the new laws, while others staged rallies in Moscow. At one such demonstration, a handful of young activists unfurled banners with the slogan: “Better Abortion than Bad Parenting.” “Why should a priest decide what I do with my body?” said one young feminist, Dina Orlova, 31, objecting to the inclusion of priests on an expert council that drafted the Russian bill. “Women do not owe the state, they don't have to give birth like machines.” The Soviet Union was the first country to legalize abortion, in 1920, but dictator Josef Stalin outlawed it in 1936, seeking to boost births, and it was illegal until 1955, two years after his death in 1953. The only way to reduce abortions, Yerofeyeva said, 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, while Soviet-made intrauterine devices (IUDs) often did not work. Patients and physicians were equally skeptical about first-generation, high-dosage oral contraceptives, believing hormones to be responsible for all manner of ills and discomforts. With the arrival to the market of modern methods of contraception in the 1990s, abortion rates fell by almost a third but have since dropped more slowly. Experts say women using the pill as their main line of defense against unwanted pregnancy remains low, below 20 percent. “Our sexual revolution came 30 years later than in the West and was only for a very small class of women,” Kosterina said. Only ten percent of Russian women who abort are ending a first pregnancy, she said, adding most have one or two children. At a peach-and-teal toned private clinic, Irina, 27, was having her second operation in a little over a year. Unmarried, with a mortgage and parents in a faraway provincial city, she said she cannot afford a child. “Besides, my boyfriend doesn't want it,” she said - but admitted that they do not use any regular form of contraception. https://www.iol.co.za/dailynews/lifestyle/russia-worlds-highest-rate-of-abortions-1176756 Interesting look into Russia. I guess legalization of abortion doesn't necessarily lead to lower abortion rates. Russia had the highest rates of abortion in the world before those laws were passed.
. Why should it? ...and out of that whole article THAT was all you got?...that's such a simplistic response to a complicated issue. Says a lot about Russia, none of it good.....the life and economy must really stink. ""“Why should a priest decide what I do with my body?” said one young feminist, Dina Orlova, 31, objecting to the inclusion of priests on an expert council that drafted the Russian bill. “Women do not owe the state, they don't have to give birth like machines.” The Soviet Union was the first country to legalize abortion, in 1920, but dictator Josef Stalin outlawed it in 1936, """ Stalin, Anti-Choice ……
