It's another salvo in
Russia's slowly escalating abortion wars, which are beginning to look
more and more like ones we're mired in stateside.
Russian newspaper Izvestia reported on the meeting at Christ the Savior yesterday, and was shared in English by Russia Today
this morning. About 400 state and federal lawmakers reportedly attended
the meeting; according to RT, the resolution they passed refers to
abortion as "murder." The site reports:
According to the resolution, any induced abortion is "murder" and must be banned. This also includes contraceptives "with an abortive function" – morning-after pills and intra-uterine devices – whose production, sale and use in Russia would also be banned. Members of the assembly quoted the state statistics agency, Rosstat, as stating that the number of Russian women who use abortive contraception is now about 9 million
The document also suggests introducing criminal liability for doctors who perform abortions, for mothers who have them and also for anyone forcing or pressuring a woman to have an abortion. "Medical workers must always consider the [unborn] child as their second patient and make efforts, using all possibilities, to keep this child alive," the resolution states.
From the
1960s on, abortion has been widely available in Russia, and the country
has had one of the highest abortion rates in the world, according to
data from the United Nations (although it's dropped dramatically since
the '90s). At the same time, there doesn't seem to be widespread use or
awareness of contraception; one study by a Moscow University found that only 14 percent of women used birth control pills
and 20 percent used IUDs, while the other women who said they were
taking precautions against unwanted pregnancy were using less-effective
forms of family planning like withdrawal and the rhythm method.
It might
make sense, then, to launch a national education campaign on effective
forms of birth control but that's... not what happened. Instead, in 2011
former Russian president and current prime minister Dmitry Medvedev passed a law restricting abortion advertising, making it "illegal to describe abortion as a safe medical procedure," according to the New York Times. (Abortion is 14 times safer than childbirth.)
The Orthodox Christian lobbyists pushing for a change to Russia's constitution claimed earlier this year that they've gathered 100,000 signatures on a petition seeking a total ban on abortions, enough
to require the parliament to consider the proposal. According to RT,
previous attempts to ban abortion have been rejected by Russian
lawmakers, out of fear that it would lead to more illegal abortions and
abandoned children.
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