Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, voiced his support on Sunday for a recent spate of regional laws in Russia banning the promotion of abortion and called for a similar ban to be introduced federally.
“Unfortunately, the number of abortions in the country remains high,” Kirill said in a speech, adding that he hoped a law recently introduced in the republic of Mordovia would be replicated in other regions and “at the federal level”.
Four out of five private clinics licensed to provide medical abortions in central Russia’s Kursk region said they would opt out of performing the procedure in the future, according to the deputy governor of the region, Andrey Bolostotsky.
On 9 November, the Health Ministry in Russian-annexed Crimea reported that all private clinics in the region had “voluntarily” stopped providing abortions, which can now only be performed in state clinics after completion of a psychological consultation, which are often used to pressure women into having children.
In August, a law prohibiting “persuading women to have abortions” was adopted in the republic of Mordovia in central Russia. A similar law introducing fines for anyone “persuading” someone to have an abortion was introduced in central Russia’s Tver region at the beginning of November.
