The Governor of the Kursk Region, Roman Starovoyt, introduced a bill “on the prohibition of inducing women to undergo abortion” in the region and proposed introducing fines from 3 to 50 thousand rubles. The document was published on the website of the regional Duma.
According to the bill card, Starovoit proposed the innovations on December 1. As stated in the document, amendments are being made “in order to ensure the protection of the family, motherhood, paternity and childhood, the preservation and protection of women’s health, and the reduction of the negative consequences of artificial termination of pregnancy.”
The bill states that inducement to abortion will be shall be considered coercion, persuasion, proposals, bribery and deception of a pregnant woman. Doctors will retain the right to inform patients about artificial termination of pregnancy if there are medical indications.
“We have to admit that now the opportunity to independently and consciously, having all the necessary information, make a decision about whether to give birth to a child is not available to a woman: the existing information and cultural environment imposes abortion on a woman as an acceptable, accessible, simple “solution to problems” or, moreover, “right,” says the explanatory note to the bill.
Starovoit added: “In our society there is open propaganda of abortion under the guise of “women’s rights”, carried out by movements financed, including by countries unfriendly to the Russian Federation, which is one of the elements of the hybrid war waged against the Russian Federation.”
The Kurskie Izvestia publication writes that the bill also proposes to introduce fines: for individuals — from 3 to 5 thousand rubles, for officials — from 10 to 20 thousand rubles, and for legal entities — from 30 to 50 thousand rubles. According to local journalists, Kursk authorities also supported the proposal to completely ban abortions in private clinics.
Back in November, four out of five private clinics in the region removed abortion from the list of services, following the non-state medical institutions of Crimea. Later, private organizations of the Lipetsk region made the same decision.
At the same time, deputies of the Legislative Assembly of the Nizhny Novgorod region are going to introduce such amendments to federal legislation. Residents of the region have already spoken out against this — they signed a petition calling the new restrictions a violation of human rights.
Several regions have already introduced fines for “inducing abortion.” This bill was first adopted in Mordovia, then similar innovations appeared in the Tver and Kaliningrad regions.
Interruption of the right to the body. Authorities in Russia are consistently making access to abortion more difficult, but for now they are trying to do without an outright ban.