In The Faith - A Chronicle of the Christian Faith

The new regulations in Russia do not impose any restrictions on abortions in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, does not make it a crime to have an abortion for babies with “severe physical deformities”, and does not make it illegal to have an abortion when the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life.

The new regulations reduced the possibilies for state funded abortions to these four conditions:
1. Rape
2. Imprisonment
3. The Death or sever disability of the husband
4. A Court ruling stripping a woman of her parental rights.

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.

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.

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Filed under: Marriage and Family