‘If the man decides, the woman will give birth’

How the Kremlin made women’s bodies part of its demographic strategy

Russia’s campaign to raise birth rates has grown more aggressive over the past year. The state has expanded pressure on women and girls, making abortions harder to access and promoting pregnancy as a social norm rather than a personal choice. Women seeking abortions now encounter clinics touting anatomically incorrect “embryo” dolls, priests offering spiritual guidance, and prayer services held before the “Helper in Childbirth” icon. The independent Russian outlet 7×7 spoke with women’s rights experts about the Kremlin’s crackdown on reproductive rights. Meduza summarizes its reporting.

Russia is waging a renewed — and increasingly overt — campaign of reproductive pressure on women, says Irina Fainman, an activist and founder of the Emergency Contraception Storage Fund. In the name of boosting birth rates, authorities have spent the last year seeking to discourage women from having abortions while steadily decreasing access to safe procedures.

Measures that were once quietly implemented are now openly acknowledged. In November, for example, the Russian Orthodox metropolitan in Saratov issued a directive assigning a priest to every women’s health clinic in the city. Their task: dissuading women from having abortions by framing the procedure as sinful. “In the past, officials avoided drawing attention to priests working with women’s health clinics,” Fainman says. “Now they talk about it openly.”

Similar church-led anti-abortion campaigns have appeared elsewhere. In the Vologda region, the local perinatal center has held weekly prayer services before an icon known as the “Helper in Childbirth” since December. (The regional governor, Georgy Filimonov, is known for his anti-abortion views.)

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Women seeking abortions at these clinics are also sent for pre-abortion counseling. One such counselor in Chelyabink, psychologist Olga Nazarenko, told the local outlet 74.ru that she presents women with a tiny figurine that she compares to an “embryo” — an anatomically incorrect “doll” that resembles a full-term fetus. She then asks them if they’re willing to turn away the child “knocking at their door.” When women attend sessions with their partners, Nazarenko tells the men they are the “foundation” of the household — and that “if the man decides they should have the baby, the woman will give birth.”

Maria Karnovich-Valua, a women’s rights activist, says such pressure is unlikely to reduce the number of abortions overall but is likely to traumatize women. Abortions, she argues, will continue, because women will continue to demand access to them. Both Karnovich-Valua and Fainman say the state’s anti-abortion measures have failed to raise birth rates: most women who seek abortions already have children and are unlikely to change their minds.

Nowhere to turn

Russia’s Health Ministry has framed pre-abortion counseling as a success, claiming that in 2024, psychologists persuaded an additional 25 percent of women seeking abortions to abandon their plans. Fainman urges skepticism toward such figures, arguing that they often reflect institutional targets rather than reality. Regional officials and doctors under pressure to meet fertility KPIs may manipulate abortion statistics.

Fainman notes that just because a woman formally refuses an abortion procedure doesn’t mean the pregnancy is carried to term. Some later travel to private clinics in other regions, while others experience miscarriages.

At the same time, regional governments have adopted laws banning what they call “incitement to abortion” — defined as persuasion through advice, offers, bribery, or deception. As of November 2025, such laws were in force in 24 Russian regions and in the city of St. Petersburg, according to The Insider. Critics say the rules effectively bar doctors from providing full medical information and prevent relatives from offering advice, since either could be interpreted as encouraging abortion.

In December, a man in Saransk became the first person in Russia fined for “incitement” under the new law, after he offered to pay for an abortion when he learned his partner was pregnant with twins. The woman refused and sought legal assistance from an anti-abortion organization.

Federal authorities have reinforced these efforts by restricting access to information. Since September 2025, Russia’s federal censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, has blocked websites accused of “promoting refusal of childbirth.” In response, the Emergency Contraception Storage Fund shut down its VK page and moved its content to a website hosted abroad. Ten days later, Roskomnadzor blocked that site as well.

Meanwhile, private clinics across the country have been “voluntarily” cutting abortion services. While this trend began in 2024, it accelerated sharply in 2025. Clinics in 52 regions have fully or partially stopped performing abortions. And in 15 regions, the procedure is now only available in state-run hospitals, where women are subjected to counseling and warned about side effects associated with so-called “post-abortion syndrome.” Karnovich-Valua says private clinics face relentless inspections and implicit threats of prosecution unless they surrender their licenses to perform the procedure.

Meanwhile, so-called abortion tourism has increased as Russian women travel to neighboring regions to obtain procedures. In one case, a woman who had been refused an abortion in Vologda traveled to Yaroslavl for the procedure, spending 50,000 rubles — more than $600 — on the trip.

Making teen pregnancy ‘fashionable’

As part of its effort to raise birth rates, the Kremlin has leaned heavily into promoting pregnancy and casting motherhood in a positive light. In 2025, the authorities twice marked Pregnant Women’s Day, declared a national holiday two years earlier.

During his annual call-in show in December 2025, President Vladimir Putin said that having children should become “fashionable.” Soon afterward, Tatyana Butskaya, a senior lawmaker on the State Duma’s family policy committee, said a “fashion for parenthood” needed to be cultivated among young people.

In practice, this has come to include schoolgirls and college-age students. In 2025, authorities in 21 Russian regions introduced support payments for pregnant students, describing the money as assistance for “girls in difficult circumstances.”

Karnovich-Valua warns that early pregnancy has well-documented consequences. Teenagers who give birth, she says, are less likely to complete higher education programs or build stable careers. Many are left without support from the child’s biological father and are forced to leave school to care for the baby, leaving them vulnerable to long-term economic precarity. At the same time, she expressed doubts that government payments would lead to a significant rise in teenagers giving birth.

Fainman and Karnovich-Valua say the most likely outcome of this messaging is not higher birth rates but an increase in sexually transmitted infections among teenagers. The promotion of “traditional values,” framed around chastity and the “sanctity” of teenage pregnancy, discourages sex education and leaves adolescents without basic knowledge about contraception.

For now, Karnovich-Valua says, the push to normalize teenage pregnancy remains largely a regional initiative. In April 2025, State Duma deputy Ksenia Goryacheva of the New People party publicly criticized the policy, calling teenage pregnancy “not heroism, but a tragedy,” and urging officials not to “use children’s naivety as a way to fix demographic statistics.”