Abortion restrictions and discouragement of female university students: Moscow wants Russian women to focus on childbearing

Vladimir Putin and his cronies are on a mission to bring back the good old days in Russia and they want Russian women to only focus on having lots of children. “In Russian families, many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and maybe even more. We should preserve and revive these wonderful traditions. Large families should be the norm, the way of life for all peoples of Russia,” the president reflected a week ago during the annual assembly of the Russian World People’s Council. The Kremlin, which believes it is now “impossible” to overcome its major demographic crisis with aid to families, has proposed more drastic measures. These range from banning abortions in private clinics to granting amnesty to female prisoners. Encouraged by their leader, in parliament and in the government they are now going further, with some officials calling for Russian women not to waste their time studying to get a university degree.

Russia is facing a severe demographic crisis exacerbated by its invasion of Ukraine, though the decline in births was first observed in 2014, the year of the Kremlin’s major reversal with the illegal annexation of Crimea. Now the birth rate has plummeted to a lower level than even during the crisis resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It stands at 1.1 million births per year, some 150,000 fewer than in the 1990s.

“It is impossible to overcome the extremely difficult demographic challenges we face with just money, social payments and other individual programs,” Putin conceded at the Russian world forum, where he advocated the fostering of “love” for the family. He failed to address other population factors such as mortality among men of childbearing age on the front lines and emigration triggered by his domestic policies.

The Kremlin has now turned to coercive measures. The Soviet Union legalized abortion in 1920, and in 2023, Russia is heading in the opposite direction. In the summer, Mikhail Murashko, the Minister of Health, proposed to limit the sale of the morning-after pill in pharmacies and to prohibit abortions in private clinics, entrusting this procedure to state-controlled medical centers. In these centers, women are often pressured not to terminate the pregnancy during the so-called “week of silence,” a mandatory waiting period between the request for abortion — when the patient is referred for psychological care, sometimes with the participation of religious personnel — and the performance of the abortion.

“A downright vicious practice has permeated society: the belief that a woman should get an education, then have a career, then make sure she has a financial base, and only then worry about having children,” Murashhko told the State Duma, Russia’s lower house, on July 18. The Minister said this before issuing a warning that late childbearing heightens the risks “between the third and fourth child.”

Although the federal government is yet to approve these measures, the governors of several regions have already taken this step on their own initiative. According to the New People party — a satellite of the Kremlin, but which opposes this wave of male chauvinism — at least 11 provinces have introduced some kind of restriction on abortion. These include the annexed Crimea, where the Moscow-imposed head of the peninsula, Sergey Aksionov, announced in early November that all private clinics in the area “have chosen to refuse abortion without the involvement of the authorities.”

Amnesty for prisoners

The Kremlin has declared this coming 2024 the “year of the family,” and this week Putin gave the green light to an amnesty for women in prison on the basis of two criteria: that they are being tried or have been convicted of non-violent crimes, and that this was the first time they had committed the offense, or they had underage children. The Duma has promptly begun work on drawing up the list of pardoned women.

The measure of reprieve was proposed by a member of the Russian president’s Human Rights Council, Eva Merkachiova, who appealed to Putin over her concern about the demographic decline. “There is a lot of talk about the need to support women’s desire to give birth, but if a prisoner does so, in two hours she is taken from the hospital to the remand center; and if she has a child (up to three years old) and becomes ill, they are separated,” the activist put forward as examples.

The Russian penitentiary service stopped reporting its statistics with the outbreak of the war and the large-scale conscription of prisoners. Its latest figures from January indicate that there were 433,000 detainees, of whom some 45,000 were women, according to Merkachiova.

Putin has granted around a dozen amnesties since 2000, most of them to mark Victory Day over Nazi Germany. This time, his pardon on so-called humanitarian grounds could coincide with another more controversial measure of reprieve: another amnesty for economic crimes. The Supreme Court has ordered that no preventive measures are ever to be applied in the investigation of these crimes.

The hammer and the stove

Putin has been more measured than his entourage on this debate. In 2021, for instance, two months before initiating the war in Ukraine, he emphasized that “you cannot impose anything [on women], you have to show all the positive sides of a large family.” However, some subordinates have been encouraged to launch all sorts of proposals in response to a predicament that plagues the president: his legacy in Russia.

Many leading and backbench politicians have spoken out in favor of Russian women giving up their studies to focus their efforts on the home. Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the State Duma, supported this view on Wednesday. “Girls need to be prepared for adult life by being taught how to cook borscht [the traditional soup] because they have to take care of their husbands, and boys need to be taught how to hold a hammer or learn new technologies because what kind of man will there be with no skills to work?”

A month earlier in October, Duma vice-chairwoman and former children’s advocate Anna Kuznetsova said in parliament that it is essential to reform the national demography plan “to halt the decline of the population and the increase in the birth rate.” “Our first children should be born when the mother is around 20 years old, then the family can have three, four or more children,” she remarked before stressing that “this is the image of the future that the president has talked about.”

This debate was echoed by Margarita Pavlova, a senator who, like other politicians, advocated “to stop sending young women to higher education because it leads to nothing.” “We have a generation of unhappy women in their 40s who are not fulfilled as mothers or as women, they do not know what a home is,” said the politician, who believes that the problem began with the Russian Revolution because “it gave women the opportunity to work and they forgot their true purpose: to give birth and take care of the home.”

Her point of view follows Putin’s. At his annual press conference in 2021, just before initiating a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the Russian leader stated that this demographic crisis is occurring in all industrialized countries. “If you look at Europe, it’s the same everywhere. What is this linked to? With a change, not of interests, but of priorities in life, including those of women in childbearing age: education, professional career and then a child, and this is now at the age of 30. And sometimes you will not even think about the second. This a very subtle thing, even demographers do not have clear answers to these processes,” regretted the Russian president.

This ultra-conservative impulse has gone so far that the satellite party New People — Novie Liudi, in Russian —, has presented a bill to fine politicians who formulate insulting proposals towards women. “We have heard about a tax on those who don’t have children, that women don’t need higher education and many other things. This is said by men who have never given birth and do not understand why women undergo abortions,” stated the author of the bill, Vladislav Davankov, during his presentation. “Fellow colleagues, stop doing it, please. Enough is enough,” he demanded.

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