Russian abortions exceed births as couples avoid cost

Todd Prince

About 1.6 million women had a termination last year, a fifth of them under the age of 18, while about 1.5 million gave birth, said Vladimir Kulakov, vice president of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow.

“Many more abortions weren’t reported,” Mr Kulakov said in the government’s official newspaper.

“The appearance of a first child pushes many families into poverty.,” Mr Kulakov said. Potential parents first try to start a career, stand on their feet and so forth.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the ensuing hyperinflation and economic contraction wiped out savings and incomes and discouraged couples from having children.

Russians had about 23% more abortions than US women in 2004, while the former communist country’s population is half the size.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the nation’s low birth rate a “national problem” in his annual address in April.

Russia plans to increase the amount spent on health in 2006 by 81% to 127.3 billion rubles (E3.7), or about 25 per citizen, as record high oil prices boost revenue and as the population ages.

The number of Russian pensioners outnumbered children and adolescents for the first time five years ago.

Abortion was considered a primary form of birth control during the last few decades of the Soviet Union. In 1990, there were four million, according to the Federal Statistics Service.

While improved education has helped cut the number of terminations by almost two-thirds since then, potential parents are being deterred by an increase in poverty and decline in the quality of health care, Mr Kulakov said.

The average monthly wage in Russia, Europe’s most populous country and home to one of the world’s biggest clusters of billionaires, is about E245 and one in four people lives below the poverty line, according to government statistics.

Careers traditionally favoured by Russian women, such as in education and medicine, no longer pay a decent salary, which leads to fewer births and ultimately a smaller population, Mr Kulakov said.

For every 1,000 Russians there are 16 deaths and 10.6 births, a gap that isn’t being filled by immigrants and leading to a population decline of about 800,000 a year. Out of every 1,000 Russian newborn babies, more than 12 die before they are one year old, an infant mortality rate five times higher than in Iceland and three to four times higher than in Finland, Sweden, Spain and France, Russia’s Federal Statistics Service reported.