Paul Goble
Staunton, May 23 – Moscow’s plan to make birthrates in the federal subjects a key performance indicator (KPI) in the evaluation of the performance of their respective governors, a plan intended to boost birthrates (ura.news/news/1052936937), is already having some problematic and unintended consequences.
Perhaps the largest and most-commented-upon of these have been efforts by some governors to limit access to abortions; but in many ways this has backfired: Not only are the number of abortions in most regions now quite low, but women are travelling to those regions where abortions are still readily available (jamestown.org/program/abortion-tourism-on-the-rise-in-russia-as-regions-adopt-different-policies/).
But other governors in pursuit of higher birthrates and Kremlin approval have been pursuing a pro-natalist policies. But these policies have had a greater impact on immigrant and non-Russian women than on ethnic Russian ones, thus shifting the ethnic balance in a very different way than the Kremlin wants (nakanune.ru/news/2025/5/23/22821731/).
However, it is a third policy initiative now being pursued by eight governors that may cause the most alarm. Despite widespread criticism, these regional heads are not promoting pregnancies among schoolgirls in the hopes of boosting birthrates overall (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2025/04/rf-regions-promoting-teenage.html and moscowtimes.ru/2025/05/27/vosmoi-region-vvel-viplati-beremennim-shkolnitsam-a164386).
None of these policies is likely to do much, but they allow Putin to shift the blame from the center to the regions yet again and thus now have to address the key factors driving down birthrates in Russia now – income inequality and uncertainty about a future in which Russia remains at war and isolated.
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