Claims women were given abortions without anesthesia in Russian hospital to be investigated

Claims that a hospital in the Khanty-Mansiysk autonomous district in the Russian Urals has been performing abortions without anesthesia are to be investigated, the regional Health Department has confirmed.

Independent Russian news channel Dozhd first reported that women seeking to terminate their pregnancies were being operated on at the Surgut City Hospital without anesthesia on Monday. One woman who spoke to the channel said that she had not been offered anesthesia for a gynecological procedure which would normally require it, and that the doctor had told her simply to “take the pain”, adding that she had feared she would “black out from the pain”.

Another woman told Dozhd that she underwent an abortion at the same hospital, during which the doctor continued to perform the procedure despite her experiencing “searing, unbearable pain” after the anesthesia failed to take effect. She said that the doctor later told her: “That’s what you deserve. Next time, you’ll know better than to get an abortion.”

Independent news outlet Mediazona reported that Mikhail Kurnosikov, the hospital’s chief physician, had carried out the operations in question. Kurnosikov, who has denied the allegations, insisted that he had always followed medical procedures. In an interview with news agency URA, he said that his patients had lodged “no complaints” against him and dismissed the allegations as “harassment” by “foreign agents”.

“Patients are anaesthetised during surgical procedures”, the Khanty-Mansiysk Health Ministry said in a statement responding to a social media post about the abortions, adding that there had been “no complaints against medical staff” and that it had “initiated a review into the published allegations”.

The Russian authorities have been gradually restricting access to abortions in an attempt to bolster the country’s perilously low birth rate, with private clinics in nine regions across Russia now refusing to perform the procedure. Fines have been introduced in 14 Russian regions for “encouraging abortions”, and laws have been passed prohibiting abortion “propaganda”.

Younger people are being incentivised with cash payments to have children in a number of regions. In the Chelyabinsk region in the Urals, under 24s are eligible for a one-off payment of 1 million rubles (€10,750) per child, while in the republic of Komi in the Russian Arctic, new parents have been offered 500,000 rubles (€5,370).