Abortion hits health agenda in Russia
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The Russian government is considering ways to cut the country's high number of abortions in an attempt to tackle the post-Soviet demographic decline, which threatens its economic prosperity.
Russia's depopulation problem has been a worrying issue for the country since the Soviet Union collapsed. The population has fallen by 12 million since 1994, thanks largely to poverty, disease and alcoholism. Successive governments have launched various initiatives to halt the decline, from tax breaks to giving out medals to large families.
At a meeting reporting on health issues to the Russian president today, Health Minister Tatyana Golikova announced that the ministry was looking at new ways of reversing the decline. "Reducing abortions is definitely on today's agenda,” she announced, adding that in 2008, there were almost as many abortions in Russia as there were births – with 1,714,000 children born and 1,236,400 terminations.
Ms Golikova cited statistics from some Russian regions, where the abortion rate have been cut by nearly 20%, but did not give much detail on how this was achieved.
According to the UN, Russia has the highest abortion rate in the world, 53.7 per 1,000 women - a legacy of Soviet times when contraception was not widely available and women turned to abortion as their main form of birth control.
Ironically, preliminary statistics released this week show that Russia’s population actually grew last year by around 25,000 – the first time there has been an upward population trend since the fall of Communism.
