Restricting or Even Banning Abortions Won’t Boost Population Growth, Russian Sociologist Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Feb. 11 – Restricting or even banning completely access to abortions will not boost Russia’s population growth and has “more a symbolic character,” according to a Russian sociologist. The reason is simple: the number of abortions has long been falling because the country’s “contraceptive culture” has fundamentally changed.
    The sociologist whom Novaya Gazeta cites anonymously lest he and the publication get in trouble says that Russian men and women now prefer safe sex, significantly reducing the need for abortions safe for “exceptional circumstances” (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/02/11/chislo-abortov-i-tak-neuklonno-snizhaetsia).
    Bans only lead to a criminal record, and the way Russia is proceeding in this area, with bans in some federal subjects but not others, ignores the fact that people can travel from places where they are banned to others where they are not, completing vitiating the intentions of the authors of such bans, the scholar continues.
    What would boost birthrates, he says, “in the first instance,” would be an improvement in the quality of life of the population, real support for families and improving conditions for the education of children. The state must stop looking only at births and focus instead on the situation of children and their parents over the longer term.
    Not all the news on this front is bleak, the sociologist says. Those portions of the population given to a larger number of children (three or more) are now having more children than they did a decade ago. But those are the poorest Russians in rural areas and Muslims, hardly the groups the Kremlin wants to be seen as counting on.
    But the larger part of the population now makes plans for how many children it will have, and thus declining birthrates are a measure of how potential parents see the impact of children on their own life styles and how they see the future of the country as affecting any children whom they may have.   
    Consequently, the declining number of children in Russia is far less about the changing size of the prime child-bearing cohort of women than about these factors – and unless the country changes direction, the number of births is hardly likely to go up by much because the size of that cohort isn’t going to expand by a significant amount anytime soon.