Abortion in Russia
[3] Following the takeover of Russia by the Bolsheviks, the Russian Soviet Republic under Vladimir Lenin became the first country in the world in the modern era to allow abortion in all circumstances in 1920.
Through articles 1462 and 1463 of the Russian Penal Code individuals "guilty of the crime could be deprived of civil rights and exiled or sentenced to hard labor.
Not merely abortion providers, babki, were trained health care professionals—they served as nurses and midwives in especially rural areas where proper medical service was unavailable.
In October 1920 the Bolsheviks made abortion legal within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic with their "Decree on Women's Healthcare".
[9] While this campaign was extremely effective in the urban areas (as much as 75% of abortions in Moscow were performed in hospitals by 1925), it had much less on rural regions where there was neither access to doctors, transportation, or both and where women relied on traditional medicine.
[10] In the countryside in particular, women continued to see babki, midwives, hairdressers, nurses, and others for the procedure after abortion was legalized in the Soviet Union.
During the collectivization drives in the early 1930s, this was temporarily put on the back burner, but in 1934 new, stricter laws were passed on performing illegal abortions, and there was a circular of the RSFSR Procuracy and extensive stories on them in the major newspapers.
The circular requested that regional prosecutors step up efforts to combat unsanctioned abortion, citing a letter submitted to the Procuracy by an anonymous private citizen decrying the harm done to women by babki in one rural district.
A month later, Izvestiia ran a piece condemning "the plight of young women who ended up at the abortionist's doorstep after being unable to find employment.
The official title of the law was, "Decree on the Prohibition of Abortions, the Improvement of Material Aid to Women in Childbirth, the Establishment of State Assistance to Parents of Large Families, and the Extension of the Network of Lying-in Homes, Nursery schools and Kindergartens, the Tightening-up of Criminal Punishment for the Non-payment of Alimony, and on Certain Modifications in Divorce Legislation".
All of this was part of the Soviet initiative to encourage population growth, as well as place a stronger emphasis on the importance of the family unit to communism.
[17] This decree provoked resentment and opposition among urban women arguing that it was often impossible to have a child when they were trying to further their careers (as the Soviet state actively promoted female education and work placement) and because of inadequate housing and supplies needed to care for children.
The anti-abortion laws in practice were only marginally more enforceable than in tsarist times and babki continued to ply their trade, knowing that there was little risk of being caught.
Although there were numerous cases of women checking into hospitals after undergoing botched abortions, it was usually impossible to tell if they had had a miscarriage, a self-performed one, or one performed by a babka.
The first was "unconditionally removable", things that could be remedied by government action, such as material need, lack of space, no one at home, or no institution to put the child in.
The second category was "conditionally removable", things that might possibly be remedied by government action, such as the absence of a husband, family troubles, or illness of one or both parents.
By the end of the Brezhnev era in 1982, Soviet birthrates hovered just at or below replacement level except in the Muslim-majority Central Asian republics.
[26] The early years of the Russian Federation were marked by declining rates of fertility and abortion and increased access to and use of preventative birth control.
The official policy of the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse was pro-family planning, although contraceptives were generally unavailable to the public, leaving most women with abortion as the only way to regulate family size.
Many women who used no method of birth control at all also cited the option of abortion as a reason that they did not concern themselves with modern or even traditional family planning strategies.
This overall declining rate of fertility was one of the two main structural factors in Russia that promoted abortion over preventative birth control.
Other factors lowering the rate of abortion include measures taken by President Vladimir Putin to increase family size in Russia.
Attempts to mitigate population decline started with increased financial support for young children in Russia and eventually led to restricted access to abortion.
[25] While abortion rates in these Asian republics were not as high as those in Western Russia at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and are still not the highest in the country, they did rise.
National concern about declining population was a continuing trend since the 1980s, and caused the new regime to adopt anti-family planning policies.
[1] The new law also made mandatory a waiting period of two to seven days before an abortion can be performed, to allow the woman to "reconsider her decision".
In cases when the illegal abortion resulted in the death of the pregnant woman, or caused significant harm to her health, the convicted individual faces a jail term of up to 5 years.
The Russian appointed minister for health, Konstantyn Skorupskyi, said that it was “offered to contribute to improving the demographic situation by giving up providing abortions.
[34] Parliament passed and in 2011 President Dmitri Medvedev signed several restrictions on abortion into law to combat "a falling birthrate" and "plunging population".
Medvedev's wife Svetlana Medvedeva had taken up the anti-abortion cause in Russia in a weeklong national campaign against abortion called "Give Me Life!"
