Russia: Vladimir Putin Relaunches His Fight to Increase the Birth Rate

Could a new wind in favor of “pro-life” values be blowing through Moscow at the close of autumn? The Russian president gave a speech to this effect before members of the civil society at the beginning of November 2023.

Abortion Denounced as Curbing the Birth Rate

The master of the Kremlin then mentioned abortion as “an acute problem,” complaining about the mediocre results of his demographic policy: in fact, according to the Rosstat statistics agency, whose authority on the matter is well-recognized, at the beginning of 2023, Russia had 146,447,424 inhabitants—that is to say, fewer than when he took office at the tsar’s palace.

There is some hope of seeing the abortion debate revived a few months before the presidential election—a wish which parliamentarians have taken up: a bill was filed at the State Duma, on the initiative of its chairman, Vyacheslav Volodin, banning, at the federal level, private clinics from practicing elective abortions.

The chairman of the State Duma thus denounced “these women who do not want to have children, adopting cats and living like that until they’re 40”; while Senator Margarita Pavlova followed suit, urging young women to “stop thinking about higher education and give preference to motherhood.”

It is perhaps important to note that the Soviet Union was one of the first countries in history to legalize abortion: it was on November 18, 1920, that the practice was made legal in the very young Soviet republic. The toll, over 100 years, is appalling: over 310 million children were killed in their mothers’ wombs. That is a record difficult to look past.

A Ban on LGBT Movements

At the same time, the minister of justice launched legal action in order to classify the LGBT movement as an “extremist organization” in Russia: “a wall will thus be erected against the values which destroy Russia and which dilute our identity,” said a pleased Ekaterina Mizulina, president of Russia’s Safe Internet League, a government entity whose mission is to regulate the content published on the internet.

LGBT lobbies must thus join the list of groups banned in Russia, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses or activists linked to Putin’s opponent Alexei Navalny.

“This time, it is no longer a matter of discrimination but of true suppression, it’s terrible,” laments Sergey Troshin, member of the opposition, the liberal Yabloko (“apple,” in the language of Tolstoy) party, which intends to shape public opinion by describing homosexual organizations as “threatened” and “panicked.”

This did not move the all-powerful president of the Russian Federation: on November 28, 2023, addressing the World Russian People’s Council—an organization bringing together representatives of the State and civil society around the Patriarch of Moscow—he denounced a “decadent” West, whose progressive values of today constitute, according to him, a “danger.”