A child rides a scooter in the colonnade of the Victory Museum at Poklonnaya Hill War Memorial Park in Moscow, Russia, 27 August 2023. Photo: EPA-EFE/YURI KOCHETKOV
The authorities in northwest Russia’s Vologda region are to discuss introducing a total ban on abortions later this month, Vologda Governor Georgy Filimonov announced at a meeting of the regional government on Thursday.
Filimonov said the regional government planned to discuss “the need to ban abortions even in private clinics”, calling the move the result of studies carried out jointly by regional organisations “with the assistance of the Russian Orthodox Church”, in comments reported by TASS.
“The fight against the depopulation of the Russian North” has been one of Filimonov’s main priorities as governor, and he recently signed controversial legislation into law limiting the sale of alcohol to just two hours per day on weekdays, and has offered payouts to doctors for dissuading their patients from having abortions.
If approved, the total ban on abortion would be the first of its kind introduced by a Russian region, although the implications of such a measure are unclear, as abortions remain legal under Russian federal law.
While the abortion rate in Russia has dropped sharply since the early 2000s — from over 2 million abortions annually in 2000 to just over half a million in 2022 — several regions and Russian-occupied Crimea have introduced restrictions on abortions over the past few years in an attempt to boost Russia’s dwindling birth rates.
Measures introduced have included banning private clinics from offering abortions, and introducing fines for doctors found to have “persuaded” women to terminate a pregnancy. Nevertheless, a proposal by the Nizhny Novgorod regional parliament for a federal ban on abortions in private clinics was rejected by the State Duma in December 2023.
Despite a Kremlin campaign aimed at raising Russia’s plummeting birth rate that has led to the introduction of fines for spreading so-called “child-free propaganda” in broadcast media and online, it has so far stopped short of banning abortions altogether.
In December, Vladimir Putin admitted that the issue of abortions in Russia was a “sensitive” one and that the government had to consider “religious beliefs and demographic issues” but also “a woman’s right to choose”.
