Paul Goble
Staunton, June 24 – Speaker after speaker at this years Russian Health Organization Congress meeting said that “we await the time when the financial possibility of the government will allow for fundamental changes” in the amount of money Moscow can give families, Nakanune journalist Elena Rychkova says.
She does not draw the conclusion but many who read her words about what medical experts think are likely to view such comments as an implicit criticism of Putin’s high levels of spending on his war in Ukraine, something that has reduced resources available for other needs including healthcare (nakanune.ru/articles/123577/).
The medical experts attending the conference said that the two primary causes of the declining birthrate in the Russian Federation are the rapidly falling number – more than 400,000 annually – of women in the prime childbearing age cohort and social-economic limitations such as apartment sizes and family incomes.
Neither of these can be solved quickly, the first especially, but the second is so important that it cannot be denied as it so often is, the doctors and medical officials said. They also suggested that there was little room for improvement in infant and child mortality, but there is some and said that Moscow would do well to consider putting more money there.
That is particularly the case, Rychkova reports that they argued, because such spending will likely lead to a higher birthrate (which after all is about live births rather than all of them) in a far shorter period of time than even massive investment in boosting family incomes and waiting for the appearance of a larger pool of mothers a generation from now.
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