Paul Goble
Staunton, Nov. 18 – The Kremlin has stepped up its campaign against abortions in the hopes of boosting the birthrate, an investigation by the independent media outlet Takiye Dela says; but instead of achieving that goal, it now faces a situation in which ever more women are seeking back alley abortions thereby putting themselves at risk or murdering their newborns.
Official Russian government statistics dramatically understate the problems arising when abortions are effectively banned They show no doctors charged with performing illegal abortions in 2024, and only a relative handful of cases in which mothers of unwanted children decide to kill them (takiedela.ru/notes/ubiystva-detey-i-zapret-abortov/)
But the experience of other countries and of Russia in the past when the state had banned abortions suggest that the real numbers of these crimes are far larger, Takiye Dela says, possibly by several orders of magnitude; and demographers are nearly unanimous that an abortion ban now will not achieve what the government hopes for.
The murders of newborns restrict population growth, but back alley abortions are likely to have an even larger impact in that regard because they often leave the women involved without the ability to bear children in the future when their circumstances and hence desires concerning children may change
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