TALLINN, Estonia: They were prohibited during the era of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, but became common under subsequent Kremlin leadership. Presently, in under a century, official stances on abortion in Russia are undergoing yet another transformation.
Despite the continued legality and widespread accessibility of abortion, there is a growing contemplation of fresh restrictions, coinciding with President Vladimir Putin’s increasingly socially conservative shift and his efforts to combat Russia’s population decline.
President Putin, who has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church, is now emphasizing traditional family values, often employed as a means to distinguish his nation from Western perspectives on issues like LGBTQ+ rights and other policies.
It is perceived by some as reminiscent of the Stalinist period, during which abortion was prohibited in 1936, leading women with unwanted pregnancies to resort to clandestine and perilous methods.
My grandmother, a former teacher at a vocational school, once recounted to me stories of abortions conducted in the dormitories using improvised methods, shared Lina Zharin, a psychotherapist and feminist activist based in Kaliningrad. In this region, lawmakers are currently deliberating the prohibition of abortion in private clinics.
It seems that this knowledge is widely acknowledged, and the grimness of those times is still vivid in people’s memories. Many are taken aback and indignant at the prospect of regressing to that era, she remarked.
Two years after Stalin’s death in 1953, authorities reversed the abortion ban to mitigate the hazards of clandestine procedures. Nevertheless, they did not endorse contraceptive methods. As Michele Rivkin-Fish, an anthropologist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, noted, the government maintained a “pro-natalist” stance, aiming to encourage women to have children while continuing to work.
Abortion became a prevalent solution to cope with unwanted pregnancies in the midst of the challenging Soviet economic conditions, despite the often dire conditions at the clinics, as Rivkin-Fish attested.
Anesthesia was often in short supply, and there was little privacy, as abortions were performed alongside other patients in the ward, she explained. Additionally, the painkillers available were of subpar quality and often scarce, leading to women enduring excruciating pain.
During the era of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s, a movement for family planning and improved access to birth control was initiated by a predominantly female group of physicians, as detailed by Rivkin-Fish.
Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, President Boris Yeltsin allocated funding for family planning and birth control programs, and healthcare professionals received training to prescribe and administer contraceptives.
Dr. Lyubov Yerofeyeva, a gynaecologist and reproductive health specialist at the forefront of this endeavour, stated, they all completed a comprehensive federal family planning course that I both taught and led.
By the late 1990s, federal funding for these programs dwindled due to conservative opposition. However, abortion regulations remained relatively permissive. Women were permitted to terminate pregnancies up to 12 weeks without any specific conditions, and up to 22 weeks for various “social reasons,” including divorce, unemployment, or low income.
In 2003, the authorities narrowed down the criteria to just four instances: when a woman had been a victim of sexual assault when she was incarcerated, when her parental rights were restricted, or in the event of her husband’s death or severe disability during her pregnancy.
“This marked the initial indication that the government was taking steps to reduce abortion rates by imposing access restrictions,” commented Rivkin-Fish.
In 2011, conservative lawmakers introduced further restrictions, such as requiring women to obtain permission from their spouses or parents if they were underage. Additionally, doctors were granted the right to refuse performing an abortion if it conflicted with their personal beliefs, and a mandatory waiting period of two to seven days, contingent on the pregnancy stage, was introduced to allow women an opportunity to reconsider their decision.
Yerofeyeva, along with the reproductive health group she led, the Russian Association of Population and Development, resisted these proposed measures. As a result, only two were implemented nationally: the allowance for doctors to decline based on their beliefs and the mandatory waiting period of 48 hours to one week.
In 2012, the list of “social reasons” for permitting abortions between the 12th and 22nd weeks of pregnancy was reduced to only cases involving rape.
In 2015-16, under Health Ministry regulations, doctors were required to provide women with the opportunity to listen to the “fetal heartbeat” and display ultrasound images. They also revised the abortion consent form to underscore its associated risks, the potential of not resorting to abortion, and the preference for carrying a pregnancy to term.
Yerofeyeva’s Russian Association for Population and Development was designated a “foreign agent,” a designation that implies increased government scrutiny and carries significant negative connotations, leading to the cessation of its activities shortly thereafter.
Just last year, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova instructed the Health Ministry to explore the possibility of prohibiting abortions for individuals under the age of 18 without parental consent.
In a speech to parliament this year, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko criticized women who prioritize their education and careers over childbearing. He voiced support for a ban on abortions in private clinics, where as much as 20% of abortions have taken place in recent years. Additionally, he took steps to restrict the availability of abortion pills, which are approved for terminating pregnancies within the first 10 weeks.
