Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 7 – Putin and other central officials continue to declare that getting Russian women to have more children is a matter of national security; but despite that, an investigation by the Horizontal Russia portal finds, Moscow is closing down birthing homes and cutting back on other obstetric facilities.
This disconnect has sparked anger among potential mothers, local and regional officials and the nurses and doctors who have lost their jobs or have been forced to work without the kind of support they need to ensure that women can deliver their babies safely and efficiently (semnasem.org/articles/2025/10/07/pochemu-zakryvayut-roddoma).
Over the past five years, Moscow has closed a minimum of 150 birthing homes which had handled fewer than 100 births in the previous 12 months. As birthrates continue to fall over much of the country, the number of such facilities which have been shuttered is rising at an ever more rapid rate.
The Russian health ministry says that pregnant women can get the services they need in hospitals, but according to doctors and mothers with whom Horizontal Russia spoke, that is not the case. Many obstetric departments are understaffed and poorly equipped or are located much further away from where people live than the birthing homes.
The Russian government under Putin does not publish statistics on this phenomenon, but it is almost a certainty that the shuttering of birthing homes is leading some Russians to decide not to have children, exactly the opposite of what it’s declared policy is and yet another example of the increasingly internally inconsistent nature of the Kremlin leader’s policies.
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