Patriarch Kirill and Metropolitan Tikhon previously made a proposal to adopt a federal law prohibiting inducing women to have an abortion. Senator Kovitidi supported the initiative and proposed criminalizing the administrative article
The Criminal Code must establish liability for inducing a woman to have an abortion, Olga Kovitidi, a member of the Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building, senator from the Republic of Crimea, told RIA Novosti.
Earlier, Patriarch Kirill proposed adopting a federal law banning inducing women to have an abortion. According to him, this is also necessary due to the demographic crisis in the country. Metropolitan Tikhon of Simferopol and Crimea also spoke about the need for such a law.
“I share the position... of Bishop Tikhon on the inadmissibility of inciting women to have abortions and the provision of administrative liability for these unacceptable actions. It is obvious that deliberate actions aimed at forcing a pregnant woman to have an artificial abortion through persuasion, proposals, bribery, deception, and other demands must be punished,” Kovitidi said.
In addition, the senator proposed to “more carefully” study the issue of criminalizing an administrative article by adding Art. 123 of the Criminal Code (“Illegal abortion”), paragraph 4, which provides for punishment for inducing or coercing a woman to have an abortion.
In her opinion, issues related to cases of medical indications for termination of pregnancy should be clearly regulated in order to preserve the life and health of a woman. “Large families in Russia should become the norm of public life. To do this, women must want to have children. The state should consider additional measures of material support for families in which four, five or more children are born,” she added.
In early August, deputies of the state assembly of the Republic of Mordovia for the first time adopted a law that prohibits the promotion of abortion in the region. Its authors noted that the Concept of State Family Policy in Russia for the period until 2025 names termination of pregnancy as one of the factors that negatively affects women’s health, and also recognizes the high number of abortions as one of the reasons for the low birth rate. Subsequently, a similar law was adopted by deputies of the Tver region.
The head of the Komi Republic, Vladimir Uyba, also proposed the day before to exclude abortions from compulsory health insurance policies (CHI). “In the context of the problem of demography and population conservation, our proposals have already been formulated to bring to administrative responsibility for inducing women to have an abortion. And here, at the regional level, I propose to tighten as much as possible the measure of liability for forced abortion,” he said.
In July, the head of the Ministry of Health, Mikhail Murashko, said that the country plans to tighten control over the circulation of abortion drugs by the end of the year. The minister also called the desire to postpone having children for the sake of a career vicious. In addition, since the beginning of the month, private clinics in several Russian regions, including Crimea and the Kursk region, have announced their refusal to perform abortion procedures.
The number of abortions in Russia has been declining since the early 1990s, by an average of 6% per year. In 2020, Rosstat recorded 553 thousand abortions (for every 100 births there were 38.8 cases of artificial termination of pregnancy). At the end of 2022, this number has already decreased to 506 thousand. Moreover, according to Rosstat, private clinics account for a fifth of all abortions performed in the country.
It also follows from the report of the statistical agency that in 2022 the number of abortions in the private healthcare segment increased by 2.8%, and in the public sector decreased by almost 3.7%. At the same time, last year sales of drugs for medical abortion and emergency contraception increased significantly - by about 60%.