#7 - JRL 7305
Population Decline, Economic Realities See Abortion Restricted in Russia
By Sergei Blagov
CNSNews.com Correspondent
August 28, 2003

Moscow (CNSNews.com) - Citing economic reasons, the Russian government has imposed restrictions on abortions in a country which has long had one of the world's highest abortion rates.

Russia's health ministry has been spending some five percent of its annual budget on funding free abortions, according to Lyudmila Pospelova, head of the ministry's gynecology department, and so had to take measures to limit the number.

The new regulations do not affect abortions in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, which remain unrestricted.

Also, abortions remain legal if the baby has severe physical deformities or the pregnancy endangers the mother's life.

But until earlier this month, Russian women were also able obtain a state-funded abortion between 12 and 22 weeks gestation by citing one of 13 special circumstances, or "social indicators," which included divorce, poverty, unemployment or poor housing.

The government on Aug.11 reduced the number of indicators to four - rape, imprisonment, the death or severe disability of the husband, or a court ruling stripping a woman of her parental rights.

In the late 1930s, dictator Joseph Stalin, needing more soldiers for the Red Army, imposed a ban on abortion in order to speed up population growth.

After his death in 1953, the ban was lifted and abortion became the primary birth control method in the former Soviet Union.

Although the number of abortions has declined in recent years from more than four million in the late 1980s to 1.94 million last year, there are still more abortions than births in Russia.

In some regions, abortion rates are on the rise. For instance, in 2002 the Sverdlovsk region in the Urals witnessed a 16 percent increase in the number of abortions, according to the region's chief health official Boris Nikonov. For every 100 births in the region, there are nearly 104 abortions, he said.

A low birth and high mortality rate has over the past decade fuelled a steady population decline.

Last year, the State Statistics Committee's census department announced that the country's population had fallen by 2.2 million people since a census in 1989.

Russia now has some 145 million people, and there are roughly 1.6 deaths for every birth.

As such, the health ministry's move is seen here as part of a campaign to reverse the country's demographical decline, under pressure from conservative lawmakers and the Orthodox Church.

The move has its critics, however.

Tatyana Phillipova, a chief gynecologist in Central Russia, was quoted as saying the new policy could spark an increase in illegal abortions, and that Russia's demographical problems should be solved in a different way.