TALINN, Oct 27: Despite its last-minute scheduling, the meeting at a bookstore in Russia’s westernmost city of Kaliningrad still drew about 60 people, with many outraged by a lawmaker’s efforts to ban abortions in local private clinics.
The weeknight turnout surprised and heartened Dasha Yakovleva, one of the organizers, amid recent crackdowns on political activism under President Vladimir Putin.
“Right now, there is no room for political action in Russia. The only place left is our kitchens,” Yakovleva, co-founder of the Feminitive Community women’s group, told The Associated Press. “And here, it was a public place, well-known in Kaliningrad, and everyone spoke out openly about how they see this measure, why they think it’s unjustified, inappropriate.”
Although abortion is still legal and widely available in Russia, recent attempts to restrict it have touched a nerve across the increasingly conservative country. Activists are urging supporters to make official complaints, circulating online petitions and even staging small protests.
A GRADUAL EROSION’ OF ABORTION ACCESS
While only a proposal for now in Kaliningrad, private clinics elsewhere have begun to stop providing abortions. Nationwide, the Health Ministry has drawn up talking points for doctors to discourage women from terminating their pregnancies, and new regulations soon will make many emergency contraceptives virtually unavailable and drive up the cost of others.
“It’s clear that there is a gradual erosion of abortion access and rights in Russia, and this is similar to what has taken place in the U.S.,” said Michele Rivkin-Fish, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision rescinding a five-decade-old right to abortion has reshaped American abortion policy, shifting power to states. About half of U.S. States have adopted bans or major restrictions, although not all are being enforced due to legal challenges.
In the Soviet Union, abortion laws meant that some women had the procedure multiple times due to difficulties in obtaining contraceptives.
After the USSR’s collapse, government and health experts promoted family planning and birth control, sending abortion rates falling. At the same time, laws allowed women to terminate a pregnancy up until 12 weeks without any conditions; and until 22 weeks for many “social reasons,” like divorce, unemployment or income.
That changed under Putin, who has forged a powerful alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, promoting “traditional values” and seeking to boost population growth. Health Minister Mikhail Murashko has condemned women for prioritizing education and career over childbearing.
ABORTION BANS IN PRIVATE CLINICS
Senior lawmaker Pyotr Tolstoy said that by spring, lawmakers would strive to adopt a nationwide ban on abortion in private clinics, where about 20% took place in recent years, according to state statistics.
Conservative lawmakers failed to enact such a ban before, but the Health Ministry now says it is ready to consider it.
To Irina Volynets, an abortion opponent and children’s rights ombudswoman in the Tatarstan region, “it gives hope that this procedure will be taken out of private clinics” eventually. She also wants increased state support for women with children as an incentive for boosting birthrates.
Regional authorities have tried to get private clinics to stop offering abortions, with varying success. Kaliningrad is mulling a region-wide ban. In Tatarstan, about a third of all private clinics no longer provide them, officials said. In the Chelyabinsk region in the Urals, three clinics agreed to halt them.
“It’s important to understand that the pressure on women will be growing” even in the absence of a total ban, said Kaliningrad psychotherapist and activist Lina Zharin, who helped organize the recent bookstore meeting. An online petition against the ban in Kaliningrad has gathered nearly 27,000 signatures.
Olga Mindolina was contemplating an abortion in 2020, traumatized by an earlier, difficult pregnancy. But when a doctor in a state clinic in the western city of Voronezh asked her what she wanted to do, she said she didn’t know -– and was told, “In this case, you should give birth.”
A clinic psychologist told her that women sometimes regret abortion, advising her to talk to her husband. A lawyer also told her about state benefits she could get if she gave birth. Mindolina decided to continue the pregnancy.
Anastasia, a Muscovite who sought an abortion in 2020, said it “wasn’t very pleasant” when a doctor urged her to change her mind.
“I simply don’t want any children,” she told AP, asking that her last name not be used for fear of reprisals.
Dr. Lyubov Yeroveyeva, a gynecologist who spearheaded family planning projects in the 1990s, believes the key is preventing unwanted pregnancies with education about birth control and making contraceptives widely available.
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