Policing women’s right to choose

In recent years, the authorities in Russia have taken to talking more and more about the need ‘to increase the birth rate’. Today, this conversation is conducted against a backdrop of war. While men are being sent off to fight in Ukraine, the increasingly loud and insistent voice of the state is telling women that the country needs them to give birth more often. On television, in parliament and in church sermons, the same idea is propounded: Russia needs more children.

A combination of general political instability, rising prices, and the constant flow of alarming news have all contributed to an atmosphere of uncertainty in Russia. Alongside this, the country’s birth rate has fallen to its lowest level in two decades. The total fertility rate in Russia is about 1.4 children per woman, significantly lower than the rate required to maintain stable population levels. While this is not an outlier in the Western world – in the United Kingdom, for instance, the coefficient is approximately 1.5 – the authorities in Russia have chosen to adopt the language of national mobilisation when addressing the demographic situation.

Exhorting Russians to have more children, bureaucrats issue warnings of a ‘demographic slump’ and the need to defend ‘traditional values’. But behind this rhetoric, a new system of restrictions is gradually taking shape. Formally, abortions remain legal in Russia. However, a range of legal, administrative and cultural barriers are being erected around this subject. An increasing number of these measures affect not only access to the medical procedure, but even the very possibility of speaking about reproductive choice.

The contrast with the late Soviet period is revealing. After the lifting of Stalin’s abortion ban in 1955, abortion became legal and widely available across the USSR. But this was not the same as reproductive freedom. Modern contraceptive methods were scarce and sex education was limited. Abortion became one of the main ways in which women could control their fertility. Some official late-Soviet era estimates suggested that the average Soviet woman had as many as eight abortions over the course of her lifetime – a stark indication that abortion culture was shaped less by choice than by the absence of other choices. These procedures could be physically damaging, and women often spoke of pain, complications, and alasting fear of a medical system that treated abortion as routine.

What has changed today is not only the law, but also the language around reproduction. The Soviet state treated abortion largely as a medical and demographic fact. But Putin’s Russia is increasingly treating fertility as a patriotic duty, wrapping demographic anxiety in Orthodox morality, wartime nationalism and active censorship of the very idea that women might choose not to give birth.

As an example: In Ekaterinburg, during an inspection of a women’s medical advice centre last autumn, Mark Itskovich and Natalya Moskvitina – representative of the regional Department of Health and an activist with the anti-abortion ‘Women for Life’ movement, respectively – spotted a noticeboard on the wall providing information about modern methods of contraception. The activist was outraged that female visitors to a medical facility were ‘being offered sterilisation, when the demographic situation is the way it is’ and ordered the staff to take the noticeboard down. She and the bureaucrat detached the offending leaflet; he then crumpled it up and trampled it under his feet.

The Russian authorities are currently discussing the introduction of the punishable offence of ‘inducement to have an abortion’. While no such legal provision exists at the federal level at the moment, legal liability for similar actions is already in effect in more than 30 regions across Russia. The problem is that the actual concept of ‘inducement’ is formulated very vaguely, and thus even an ordinary medical consultation could fall within its scope. In places where no formal prohibition has beenintroduced, doctors already speak of the self-censorship effect: they are wary of discussing the possibility of abortion in detail, consultations are becoming more cautious, and even private clinics prefer to avoid providing such services.

Pressure is also being exerted on medical institutions by conservative activist movements. The Women for Life movement, for instance, has received a presidential grant to promote pro-life activism. In addition, ultra-right activists from the Russian Commune movement, well known for their aggressive anti-immigrant raids and intimidation campaigns, have begun to give lectures in medical colleges. The lecture series, titled ‘Russian World: How We Can Survive and Win’, combines patriotic and militarised rhetoric about the ‘heroism’ of soldiers on the front line with religious anti-abortion messaging, presenting the preservation of ‘lives before birth’ as part of Russia’s so-called ‘true values’.

Two years ago, the Russian Commune movement produced a video in which soldiers of the Russian army, wearing badges depicting an eightlimbed swastika – the symbol of Slavic Rodnoverie or neo-paganism – menace ‘child-killer doctors’ from a machine gun emplacement. Currently, they continue to make videos, publishing personal information about doctors – doxxing, in other words – and organize public harassment campaigns against medical personnel.

At the same time, the Russian authorities have started to regulate not only how medicine is practised, but also how the choice not to have children is discussed. One of their most revealing steps has been the prohibition of so-called ‘child-free propaganda’, passed into law in late 2024. The prohibition can be applied to any materials in which the deliberate abstention from childbirth is presented as a normal life choice. The wording of the law is so nebulous that the boundary between ‘propaganda’ and the ordinary discussion of personal life is effectively erased.

Publications in the traditional media, discussions on social media platforms, blog posts, cultural projects and films can all fall foul of the prohibition. Thus, the state is beginning to regulate not only the actions of its citizens but also their views on procreation, an alarming restriction on free expression. When the right to choose to be child-free is labelled a suspicious ideology, the space for conversation about reproductive rights is drastically reduced.

The first fine for ‘child-free propaganda’ was imposed on a female resident of occupied Sebastopol for producing memes citing a quote attributed to Quentin Tarantino: ‘Make films, not children – that’s my motto. To hell with the snotty little bastards. I want to have fun.’ She was fined 50,000 roubles (about $685).

The Russian Orthodox Church also plays an important role in encouraging an aggressive, ‘pro-life’ atmosphere. Framing abortion as a threat to the family, the nation and ‘traditional values’, the Church has used the issue to reassert its socio-political relevance in post-Soviet Russia. Its representatives actively campaign for the official policy on abortion to be made harsher.

One of the highest-profile advocates of this line is Archpriest Andrei Tkachov, who moved to Russia from Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan revolution. Tkachov’s statements and speeches are regularly disseminated on the internet and broadcast on television.

Woman must be broken on the wheel, her horns must be snapped off … she must be curbed, ground down, stuffed into a washing machine, I don’t even know what must be done to her, that is, a man must totally break a woman’s resistance, 100%. Turn her into a real woman. Wash off all that pornographic paint that modern civilisation has applied to her.

He speaks about abortions with equal harshness:

Do not touch this, it is alive. It is not yours. What you have in your womb is not yours. Do not touch it. Just try to kill what has been conceived, and you will be ground into dust. You will never have any happiness.

While this rhetoric does provoke outrage, it continues to be heard in public social spaces, nurturing an atmosphere within which any discussion of reproductive rights is bound to be challenged by moral threats and condemnation.

In parallel, since September 2024 the authorities have launched initiatives designed to monitor female fertility.

In Moscow, woman are receiving invitations through the city’s digital health system for blood tests to measure anti-Müllerian hormone – a measure of the number of egg cells they have, and therefore their potential fertility. The programme has been described by officials as a reproductive health and pregnancy-planning initiative; according to independent media outlet RBC, 1.2 million referrals have been issued, and more than 150,000 women signed up between September and November 2024.

But in the context of the state’s current demographic policy, the tests also look like an attempt to track women’s reproductive capacity more closely. If maintaining the birth rate is declared a matter of national concern, female fertility will gradually come to be regarded as a state resource. Women who have received invitations for fertility screenings already refer to them as ‘a greeting from The Handmaid’s Tale’.

Any one of these measures alone could be considered a mere administrative initiative. But taken together, they create a different reality. Abortions are becoming hard to obtain. Doctors feel threatened by vaguely formulated laws. Voluntary, pro-government public watch patrols put clinics under pressure. Choosing to be child-free is denounced as a suspicious ideology. In an atmosphere like this, it becomes harder and harder to talk about reproductive rights. Journalists are afraid of being accused of ‘propaganda’. Doctors are afraid of disciplinary measures. Social activists are afraid of pressure from the authorities. When society can no longer talk freely about reproductive choice, the possibility of discussing demographic policy also disappears.

Russia’s demographic policy is increasingly being presented as a question of national survival. But it is precisely this rhetoric that provides justification for these unprecedented restrictions. If giving birth to children is declared to be a patriotic duty, then refusing to do so will inevitably be framed as a problem. A conversation about this refusal will be regarded as a threat. In this way, demographics is not only transformed into a social programme, it becomes ideology. And with control over the body, control over words gradually emerges.

We do not know if and when abortions are prohibited at the federal level. But today, doctors in obstetrics and gynecology clinics are already thinking twice before telling a woman something that was once very straightforward: ‘Basically, you have a choice.’

This article was first published in Index on Censorship 2/2026