Invisible barriers

Do Russian politicians really want to ban abortion?

Russian lawmakers periodically float the idea of banning abortion in the country, despite global trends toward increasing abortion access and the fact that abortion is not a particularly hot-button political issue in Russia. And even though official bans on abortion have yet to materialize, high-level discussions about the topic have had a real, chilling effect, with many private clinics “voluntarily” deciding to stop offering abortion services. At the same time, abortions have very little to do with issues that Putin and his circle claim to care about, like demographic decline. So why do Putin-aligned lawmakers keep revisiting the issue? Meduza explains.

In June 2024, the State Duma proposed making elective abortion illegal in Russia after week nine of a pregnancy — currently, abortion is legal up to week 12. Similar proposals crop up in the Duma from time to time, generate a lot of noise in Russian media, and then fade away. Still, they have real-world consequences.

Abortion remains legal in Russia, but it’s getting increasingly harder for pregnant people to access. Lawmakers recently floated the idea of banning abortion in private (as opposed to state-run) medical clinics, but these discussions never progressed to legislative action. Nonetheless, a number of private clinics started to “voluntarily” refuse to perform abortions.

Meanwhile, Putin has a proclivity for discussing “female destiny,” essentially referring to childbearing and childrearing. His supporters often turn up the temperature on that rhetoric.

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A convenient political move

Despite the fact that it’s getting harder for pregnant people to access abortions in Russia, Poland, the U.S., and a few other countries, the global trend over the past 30 years has been toward easier access to legal abortion.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, the only countries where abortion access has gotten worse since the early 1990s are El Salvador, Nicaragua, Poland, and the U.S. Russia isn’t on the list, current anti-abortion rhetoric notwithstanding.

Russia is among the countries that have so far chosen not to outlaw abortion outright but have instead put up invisible barriers. These include requiring pregnant people to wait and “think it over” for several days between seeing a doctor and having the procedure done, or forcing them to listen to the fetal heartbeat. It can be politically risky to advocate outright abortion bans, in part because doing so can damage a country’s international human rights ratings. As it is, invisible barriers to abortion access seem designed largely to punish women — if the authorities really believe that abortion is a sin and a crime, they should simply ban it.

It is also true that threatening to ban abortion is a very convenient move for conservative politicians in Russia, as in many other countries.

For obvious reasons, abortion access has both real and symbolic value for feminist movements around the world, and conservative discussions of a “woman’s destiny” are a reaction against women’s liberation. The structure of the “traditional” family, in which women shoulder a disproportionate share of domestic labor, itself prevents mothers from participating in activism — a bonus for conservative politicians who would prefer to maintain a status quo that does not feature equal rights for women.

From the standpoint of things that pro-Putin politicians say they want, outlawing abortion doesn’t make much sense. Abortion bans are terrible at enacting “demographic corrections,” protecting the lives and well-being of childbearing people, and even protecting the social status of mothers. But “ban abortion” is a very effective rallying cry against social change.

Russia’s ‘moral majority’

On the whole, abortion isn’t a religious or moral problem in Russia the way it is in, say, the U.S. Although 70 percent of Russians say they are Orthodox Christians, very few regularly attend services. The Orthodox Church actively opposes abortion, but it doesn’t have much real political influence in this realm.

Then, too, there’s a pragmatic problem. Pregnant people rarely decide to terminate the pregnancy on purely moral grounds. In Russia, as elsewhere, it’s most often an economic decision — many Russians simply cannot afford a new child.

In Russia, abortion, which has been legal since 1995 and was also legal during some periods in the Soviet Union, doesn’t function as the engine of moral panic the way it does in other countries with strong conservative political forces. This is chiefly because the “moral majority” in Russia cannot be persuaded that abortion is a sin and a violation of a “woman’s destiny.”

Russia’s “moral majority” is made up of working women, a great number of whom have had to raise children alone. They’re not easily swayed into moral panic by this particular issue. An expert in gender studies, who asked to remain anonymous, told Meduza that restrictions on the right to abortion are “purely symbolic.” “Does it seem to you like it’s your body and your right? You’re wrong. You belong to the empire and to the nation-state. In other words, it’s a signal that the Russian woman is a state woman.”

Story adapted from the Signal newsletter