MOSCOW — The United States anti-abortion movement has become a model for
Russian activists, who have even adopted the English-language term “pro-life”
as their own. American-style pickets of abortion clinics are becoming a staple
of the movement in Russia.
The campaign is heavily influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church, which is drawing on
the tacit support of the first lady, Svetlana Medvedeva, and prominent
politicians. The church, increasingly vocal on social issues under Patriarch
Kirill I, draws on widespread fears that Russians may become an ethnic minority
in their own vast country.
This week, politicians introduced amendments to a draft law in the State
Duma that would place some restrictions on abortion. Rallied by dioceses across
Russia, demonstrators marked International Children’s Day by distributing
leaflets on dangers of abortion and releasing hundreds of balloons over
Ulyanovsk, Lenin’s birthplace, to support “Russia without abortions.”
Abortion was common and readily available in the Soviet era, championed by
early 20th-century Communists in the name of women’s liberation. After the
Soviet Union became the first country to legalize abortion, it was restricted
by Stalin in his drive to increase the population. In the post-Stalin era,
however, Soviet women sometimes had multiple abortions, either because they had
little access to contraception or feared it.
Official statistics say 1.3 million abortions were performed in 2009 in
Russia, in a population of just under 143 million and falling. Opponents of
abortion and the morning-after pill, which they lump together,
say the real number is much higher.
“The number of abortions in our country reaches six to eight million a
year,” said Valery Draganov, who proposed more rigid anti-abortion legislation
in the Duma last week that was hastily withdrawn, highlighting tension on the
issue. “Every minute, two abortions are carried out in Russia. Due to botched
abortions, 20 percent of families lose the ability to become parents. One in
every five pregnant women who dies, dies as a result of abortion. These are
catastrophic statistics.”
Some abortion opponents are more strident. A Moscow priest, the Rev. Dmitri
Smirnov, said last year that women who have abortions should be jailed for
murder and that women considering abortion should be advised “not to be worse
than Himmler and Goebbels, who didn’t kill their own children.” Russian
feminists condemned his remarks.
The amendments would institute a mandatory waiting period for abortions of
48 hours to one week, depending on how long the woman had been pregnant. They
would also require women to sign a statement that they agreed to abortion after
reading of possible negative consequences, including “the onset of
infertility.”
Women over six weeks pregnant would be required to see their embryo or fetus
on ultrasound, hear its heartbeat and have
counseling. Another amendment would restrict sale of the morning-after pill.
Yelena Mizulina, chair of the Duma committee that proposed the amendments,
said that Russians support a waiting period before abortions are granted but
that for now only 25 percent favor eliminating state financing for early-term
abortions. Late last year, at a forum, she was stridently against abortion.
That forum was convened by Sanctity of Motherhood, an organization led by
Natalia Yakunina, the wife of Vladimir Yakunin, the powerful chief of Russia’s
railroads, who has created several foundations to back the Russian Orthodox
Church and to promote patriotism.
Speakers urged Russian women to have at least three children. The high birth
rate among Muslims in Russia was spoken of with some awe, both as a threat and
as something to emulate. A Russian Orthodox priest who has 18 children was
showered with praise.
Mrs. Medvedeva, whose Foundation for Social and Cultural Initiatives
promotes family values, spoke of Russia’s religious pluralism. But she also
talked about the “rights of a child to life” and about “socioeconomic
indicators” and general lack of support that she said usually drove women to
“artificial termination of pregnancy,” carefully sidestepping the word
abortion or saying outright that she opposes it.
“The state must help women keep their babies,” she said.
At a roundtable session, the vice president of Mrs. Medvedeva’s foundation,
Tatyana Shumova, said: “Due to the nature of our foundation and the president
of our foundation, we can’t say we’re against abortion, because we would
immediately be accused of curtailing democracy and violating human rights, and
everyone is free to choose.
“But we say ‘Give Me Life,”’ she said, referring to a foundation program to
promote family values.
Days later, in his state of the federation address, President Dmitri
A. Medvedev focused on Russia’s demographic crisis and proposed
measures to lift the birth rate.
At the conference, Mrs. Yakunina said Sanctity of Motherhood was conducting
a pilot program in Krasnoyarsk, an industrial city in Siberia, working with
doctors and journalists to shift public opinion and women’s choice away from
abortion. The abortion rate in Krasnoyarsk among women who had gone through the
program dropped by 16 percent, she said, which if applied to Russia as a whole
would mean 200,000 more babies a year, based on the official figure of 1.3
million annual abortions.
Russia’s anti-abortion movement is as yet small despite its influential
backing and thus has not provoked a major outcry from weakly organized women’s
groups. But it has created strange bedfellows.
Larry Jacobs, president of the World Congress of Families, based in
Rockford, Illinois, attended the Sanctity of Motherhood forum and praised
Russia’s new activists as allies. He has met with Metropolitan Hilarion of
Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow patriarchate’s department of external
church relations. On a tour of the United States, where he was invited by Jerry
Fullinwider, an oil executive who has done business in Russia since the 1980s,
Hilarion highlighted a vocal anti-abortion stance as a uniting factor between
Russian Orthodoxy and Protestant evangelicals. He has said they should form a
“strategic alliance” with Roman Catholics.
Under Patriarch Kirill, the church has embraced evangelical tactics as it
reaches out to Russians who are nominally Orthodox but rarely churchgoing. In
addition, the anti-abortion oratory familiar in the United States has found
fertile ground in Russia. Graphic Web sites, posters and leaflets are
supplemented with sweeping references to Russian history. An international
anti-abortion meeting will be held in Moscow this month with Mr. Jacobs’s
group. A brochure features blurbs by Mr. Medvedev and Prime Minister
Vladimir V. Putin on the need to raise the birth rate.
There is increasing support for restricting abortions along lines suggested
by Patriarch Kirill earlier this year, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, chairman of
the patriarchate’s department on church and society relations, said at a news
conference at RIA Novosti, an official state news agency.
“It’s clear that society’s attitude toward this phenomenon is changing, and
I think that we have all we need so as to change radically society’s attitude
toward abortion, so that abortion would become absolutely morally inadmissible
and this would be reflected in politics and law,” he said.
