Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region Gleb Nikitin introduced a bill to the regional legislative assembly prohibiting private clinics from performing abortions. The document was published on the website of the Nizhny Novgorod parliament.
The bill allows abortions only in state and municipal medical institutions. At the same time, it is proposed to reduce the pregnancy period at which abortion can be performed in public clinics from 12 weeks to eight inclusive.
The explanatory note states that the bill is aimed “at increasing the life expectancy of the population, reducing the mortality rate, increasing the birth rate, regulating internal and external migration” and “preserving and strengthening the health of the population.”
“Increasing the birth rate is possible, including by reducing the number of cases of artificial termination of pregnancy at the request of a woman, reducing the number of complications during the abortion process and preserving the reproductive function of a woman,” the explanatory note states.
As Nikitin writes, now “people born in the 1990s-2000s are entering reproductive age; it was then that there was a sharp decline in the birth rate.” “Also, young people are currently postponing the age of motherhood and fatherhood to a later period until they receive an education, a profession, or before acquiring material goods,” the governor explained the need for the law.
As the BBC Russian Service wrote, Patriarch Kirill sent a letter to the State Duma on November 8 with a request to ban private clinics from performing abortions. At the same time, against the backdrop of proposals from deputies and officials to limit women’s rights to abortions, private clinics in the Kursk region and annexed Crimea began to independently refuse them.
Interruption of the right to the body. The authorities in Russia are consistently making it difficult to access abortion, but for now they are trying to do without an outright ban.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church also supported the ban on “inducing” women to have abortions. Mordovia and the Tver region have already adopted regional laws that introduce administrative responsibility for this. A similar bill is being considered in the Tambov region.
From September 1 next year, the Ministry of Health will add the drugs Misoprostol and Mifepristone to the list of medicines subject to subject-quantitative registration. In July, the head of the Ministry of Health, Sergei Murashko, spoke in favor of restricting the sale of drugs for medical termination of pregnancy.