Lately, the authorities in Russia have taken to speaking increasingly more concerning the want ‘to extend the start fee’. Right now, this dialog is carried out in opposition to a backdrop of battle. Whereas males are being despatched off to combat in Ukraine, the more and more loud and insistent voice of the state is telling ladies that the nation wants them to present start extra usually. On tv, in parliament and in church sermons, the identical concept is propounded: Russia wants extra kids.
A mix of common political instability, rising costs, and the fixed circulation of alarming information have all contributed to an environment of uncertainty in Russia. Alongside this, the nation’s start fee has fallen to its lowest stage in twenty years. The overall fertility fee in Russia is about 1.4 kids per girl, considerably decrease than the speed required to take care of secure inhabitants ranges. Whereas this isn’t an outlier within the Western world – in the UK, for example, the coefficient is roughly 1.5 – the authorities in Russia have chosen to undertake the language of nationwide mobilisation when addressing the demographic state of affairs.
Exhorting Russians to have extra kids, bureaucrats challenge warnings of a ‘demographic droop’ and the necessity to defend ‘conventional values’. However behind this rhetoric, a brand new system of restrictions is steadily taking form. Formally, abortions stay authorized in Russia. Nevertheless, a spread of authorized, administrative and cultural boundaries are being erected round this topic. An growing variety of these measures have an effect on not solely entry to the medical process, however even the very risk of talking about reproductive alternative.
The distinction with the late Soviet interval is revealing. After the lifting of Stalin’s abortion ban in 1955, abortion turned authorized and extensively obtainable throughout the USSR. However this was not the identical as reproductive freedom. Fashionable contraceptive strategies have been scarce and intercourse training was restricted. Abortion turned one of many principal methods during which ladies may management their fertility. Some official late-Soviet period estimates recommended that the common Soviet girl had as many as eight abortions over the course of her lifetime – a stark indication that abortion tradition was formed much less by alternative than by the absence of different selections. These procedures could possibly be bodily damaging, and ladies usually spoke of ache, issues, and alasting concern of a medical system that handled abortion as routine.
What has modified right this moment will not be solely the regulation, but additionally the language round copy. The Soviet state handled abortion largely as a medical and demographic reality. However Putin’s Russia is more and more treating fertility as a patriotic obligation, wrapping demographic anxiousness in Orthodox morality, wartime nationalism and lively censorship of the very concept that girls would possibly select to not give start.
For instance: In Ekaterinburg, throughout an inspection of a ladies’s medical recommendation centre final autumn, Mark Itskovich and Natalya Moskvitina – consultant of the regional Division of Well being and an activist with the anti-abortion ‘Ladies for Life’ motion, respectively – noticed a noticeboard on the wall offering details about trendy strategies of contraception. The activist was outraged that feminine guests to a medical facility have been ‘being provided sterilisation, when the demographic state of affairs is the way in which it’s’ and ordered the employees to take the noticeboard down. She and the bureaucrat indifferent the offending leaflet; he then crumpled it up and trampled it below his ft.
The Russian authorities are at the moment discussing the introduction of the punishable offence of ‘inducement to have an abortion’. Whereas no such authorized provision exists on the federal stage for the time being, authorized legal responsibility for comparable actions is already in impact in additional than 30 areas throughout Russia. The issue is that the precise idea of ‘inducement’ is formulated very vaguely, and thus even an peculiar medical session may fall inside its scope. In locations the place no formal prohibition has beenintroduced, medical doctors already converse of the self-censorship impact: they’re cautious of discussing the potential of abortion intimately, consultations have gotten extra cautious, and even non-public clinics want to keep away from offering such companies.
Stress can also be being exerted on medical establishments by conservative activist actions. The Ladies for Life motion, for example, has acquired a presidential grant to advertise pro-life activism. As well as, ultra-right activists from the Russian Commune motion, well-known for his or her aggressive anti-immigrant raids and intimidation campaigns, have begun to present lectures in medical faculties. The lecture sequence, titled ‘Russian World: How We Can Survive and Win’, combines patriotic and militarised rhetoric concerning the ‘heroism’ of troopers on the entrance line with spiritual anti-abortion messaging, presenting the preservation of ‘lives earlier than start’ as a part of Russia’s so-called ‘true values’.
Two years in the past, the Russian Commune motion produced a video during which troopers of the Russian military, carrying badges depicting an eightlimbed swastika – the image of Slavic Rodnoverie or neo-paganism – menace ‘child-killer medical doctors’ from a machine gun emplacement. At present, they proceed to make movies, publishing private details about medical doctors – doxxing, in different phrases – and arrange public harassment campaigns in opposition to medical personnel.
On the identical time, the Russian authorities have began to control not solely how medication is practised, but additionally how the selection to not have kids is mentioned. One in all their most revealing steps has been the prohibition of so-called ‘child-free propaganda’, handed into regulation in late 2024. The prohibition might be utilized to any supplies during which the deliberate abstention from childbirth is introduced as a standard life alternative. The wording of the regulation is so nebulous that the boundary between ‘propaganda’ and the peculiar dialogue of non-public life is successfully erased.
Publications within the conventional media, discussions on social media platforms, weblog posts, cultural tasks and movies can all fall foul of the prohibition. Thus, the state is starting to control not solely the actions of its residents but additionally their views on procreation, an alarming restriction on free expression. When the correct to decide on to be child-free is labelled a suspicious ideology, the house for dialog about reproductive rights is drastically lowered.
The primary advantageous for ‘child-free propaganda’ was imposed on a feminine resident of occupied Sebastopol for producing memes citing a quote attributed to Quentin Tarantino: ‘Make movies, not kids – that’s my motto. To hell with the snotty little bastards. I wish to have enjoyable.’ She was fined 50,000 roubles (about $685).
The Russian Orthodox Church additionally performs an necessary position in encouraging an aggressive, ‘pro-life’ environment. Framing abortion as a risk to the household, the nation and ‘conventional values’, the Church has used the problem to reassert its socio-political relevance in post-Soviet Russia. Its representatives actively marketing campaign for the official coverage on abortion to be made harsher.
One of many highest-profile advocates of this line is Archpriest Andrei Tkachov, who moved to Russia from Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan revolution. Tkachov’s statements and speeches are often disseminated on the web and broadcast on tv.
Girl have to be damaged on the wheel, her horns have to be snapped off … she have to be curbed, floor down, stuffed right into a washer, I don’t even know what have to be finished to her, that’s, a person should completely break a lady’s resistance, 100%. Flip her into an actual girl. Wash off all that pornographic paint that trendy civilisation has utilized to her.
He speaks about abortions with equal harshness:
Don’t contact this, it’s alive. It isn’t yours. What you might have in your womb will not be yours. Don’t contact it. Simply attempt to kill what has been conceived, and you can be floor into mud. You’ll by no means have any happiness.
Whereas this rhetoric does provoke outrage, it continues to be heard in public social areas, nurturing an environment inside which any dialogue of reproductive rights is sure to be challenged by ethical threats and condemnation.
In parallel, since September 2024 the authorities have launched initiatives designed to observe feminine fertility.
In Moscow, girl are receiving invites by way of the town’s digital well being system for blood exams to measure anti-Müllerian hormone – a measure of the variety of egg cells they’ve, and subsequently their potential fertility. The programme has been described by officers as a reproductive well being and pregnancy-planning initiative; in line with impartial media outlet RBC, 1.2 million referrals have been issued, and greater than 150,000 ladies signed up between September and November 2024.
However within the context of the state’s present demographic coverage, the exams additionally appear like an try to trace ladies’s reproductive capability extra intently. If sustaining the start fee is asserted a matter of nationwide concern, feminine fertility will steadily come to be considered a state useful resource. Ladies who’ve acquired invites for fertility screenings already discuss with them as ‘a greeting from The Handmaid’s Story’.
Any one in every of these measures alone could possibly be thought of a mere administrative initiative. However taken collectively, they create a distinct actuality. Abortions have gotten onerous to acquire. Docs really feel threatened by vaguely formulated legal guidelines. Voluntary, pro-government public watch patrols put clinics below strain. Selecting to be child-free is denounced as a suspicious ideology. In an environment like this, it turns into tougher and tougher to speak about reproductive rights. Journalists are afraid of being accused of ‘propaganda’. Docs are afraid of disciplinary measures. Social activists are afraid of strain from the authorities. When society can now not speak freely about reproductive alternative, the potential of discussing demographic coverage additionally disappears.
Russia’s demographic coverage is more and more being introduced as a query of nationwide survival. However it’s exactly this rhetoric that gives justification for these unprecedented restrictions. If giving start to kids is asserted to be a patriotic obligation, then refusing to take action will inevitably be framed as an issue. A dialog about this refusal will probably be considered a risk. On this manner, demographics will not be solely remodeled right into a social programme, it turns into ideology. And with management over the physique, management over phrases steadily emerges.
We have no idea if and when abortions are prohibited on the federal stage. However right this moment, medical doctors in obstetrics and gynecology clinics are already pondering twice earlier than telling a lady one thing that was as soon as very simple: ‘Mainly, you might have a alternative.’
This text was first revealed in Index on Censorship 2/2026
