Hypocrite Russia promotes childbirth but won't protect pregnant women

Reproductive abuse was widespread in Russia, as in many conservative countries, even before the pandemic. The problem is rooted in gender stereotypes about what it means to be a girl and a woman.

The romanticisation of childbirth, the lack of sex education, and religious narratives on the ‘sanctity of motherhood’ has resulted in many women both longing to have children from an early age, and feeling pressured to do so.

Putin has also found common ground with evangelical Christians in the US and is trying to make his post-Soviet nation a bulwark of Christianity, with the help nationalist and ultra-conservative Russian Orthodox Church.

Earlier this year, a Russian Orthodox priest compared women in civil partnerships to “prostitutes”, while conservative politicians have been trying to introduce a “tax on childlessness” and to prohibit abortions (which have been legal for generations and are included in publicly-funded healthcare services).

Conservative forces also have used the pandemic to push back against state-funded abortions. A number of Russian hospitals used a ban on elective surgeries to delay abortions by classifying them as ‘non-essential’ services. In Moscow, only three out of 44 hospitals continued these procedures.

These moves endanger women’s rights, health and financial futures. In Moscow, one woman described having to take out a loan in order to access an abortion in a private clinic. Before this, she said a doctor at a public facility told her: “If you seek the truth, you’ll miss all the deadlines.”

Another 29-year-old woman, in the city of Petrozavodsk, said she tested negative for COVID-19 but was denied an abortion at a health centre because she had a cough. She said that the centre’s staff told her: “Go and find a place where you can get an abortion with such a cough.”

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