Putin Signs Law Banning Abortion Ads as It Decimates Russia’s Population
As abortions decimate the Russian population, Russian President Vladimir Putin has sign into law a new measure that bans advertising abortions.
From a report on the ban:
Russia’s Federal Law on Advertising now includes the ban on advertising abortions and several restrictions concerning the advertising of traditional medical practices. In addition, the changes outlaw advertising campaigns which include free drug samples if these samples contain narcotic or psychotropic substances.Abortions are legal in Russia and have been since Soviet times, but currently centrist-conservative lawmakers want to limit or completely ban such practices saying it is partly responsible for the country’s dwindling population.
In early October an official representative of the Russian Orthodox Church blasted abortions and surrogacy as “mutiny against God” and less than a month later the head of the Lower House committee for family and children, Yelena Mizulina, said in a speech that the community must urgently stop tolerating abortions and surrogacy as they threaten to wipe out the population in Russia, and the world as a whole.The move gained little support from other politicians and shortly afterwards Mizulina played down her statements saying that she wanted to draw attention to the problem and start a discussion, not introduce any legislative limitations.In September this year Deputy Health Minister Tatyana Yakovleva announced the number of abortions in Russia had fallen by a quarter over the past five years, but remains very high at about one million per year.
Russia’s population has indeed been decimated by abortion and its use as birth control.
A foreign policy expert says Russia is falling apart culturally because as much as two percent of the nation’s potential population is victimized by abortion every year. Ilan Berman says Russia’s population implosion may also cause problems for the United States and present worldwide issues.
The reality is that Russia continues to bleed population. For about a decade and a half now, projections have been that Russia’s population will plummet from 140-150 million to 104 million by 2050. What are the chief causal factors in this? There are several, but among the biggest is abortion, which occurs in Russia at an astonishingly high level. Putin has tried to slow the hemorrhage, but has failed to do so.
Abortion was legalized in Russia by the Bolsheviks shortly after they seized power in October 1917. Vladimir Lenin made good on his promise for an “unconditional annulment of all laws against abortion.” In short order, the number of abortions skyrocketed. By 1934, Moscow women were having three abortions for every live birth. The toll was so staggering that an appalled Joseph Stalin, the mass murderer, actually banned abortion in 1936, fearing a vanishing populace.
In 1955, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, reconstituted legalized abortion. By 1958, there were 5 million abortions per year in the Soviet Union. (This contradicted Margaret Sanger’s optimistic prediction that “neither abortions nor contraception will be necessary or desired” once a “functioning communistic society” was in full bloom in the Soviet Union.) By 1965, abortions peaked at 8.2 million, dwarfing the worst years in America post-Roe v. Wade. By 1970, some 3,000 full-time abortion doctors were performing roughly 7.2 million abortions per year. By the 1980s, Soviet citizens comprised 5-6 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s abortions.
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The Cold War and communism ended in Russia in the 1990s, but the runaway abortion rates did not. Those rates continued into the Putin era, with the election of Vladimir Putin in 2000. An illuminating article in the Washington Post in February 2003 reported that 13 percent of Russian couples are infertile, with more on the rise. “In nearly three out of four cases,” said the article, “infertility is attributed to the woman, typically because of complications from one or more abortions.” The Russian Health Ministry reported 1.7 abortions for every live birth—which is actually an improvement from previous decades, but only because contraception is being more widely used. Either way, it adds up to a decline in population.
In response, Putin has taken major measures to try to stem this tide. In 2003, he implemented the first restrictions on abortion in Russia in almost 50 years, limiting abortions to within 12 weeks of gestation. Exemptions were allowed only for rape or the imprisonment, death, or severe disability of the husband.
Remarkably, Putin’s Russia has even gone so far as to initiate a National Fertility Day, aimed at getting the culture to produce more Russians.
