Large 'pro-life' movement held in 34 Russian cities, calls attention to the "dry statistics of abortion"

Orthodox Christianity
Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00 UTC

© uoj.org.ua

Pro-life opponents of abortion will hold the "They Could Have Gone to School" event on September 14 to mark the start of the academic new year. The event will be held in 34 cities throughout Russia, including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Kazan, Russia, Krasnoyarsk, Tyumen, Krasnodar, Kirov, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Omsk, and Orenburg, reports RIA-Novosti.

"Members of the all-Russian movement For Life! will try to draw public attention to the fact that Russia loses the equivalent of two major schools' worth of students every day in the country's abortion clinics," the movement's press service reported.

"During the event, activists will display children's shoes on city squares, symbolizing the daily number of abortions in individual regions and localities. Organizers plan to put out 2,000 pairs of children's shoes in the capital on the square in Sokolniki Park, which corresponds to the daily number of abortions in the country. Volunteers are currently collecting shoes from Muscovites and residents of the Moscow region," For Life! reports.

According to the organizers, the shoes are designed to "visualize the dry statistics of abortion." The shoes will then be given to poor families.

Over the course of two and a half years, another program, "Save a Life," which works with more than 140 psychologists and social workers in 86 cities throughout Russia, has managed to prevent 7,000 abortions by women with financial problems. 65,000 in all have received help from the program's various facets. Activists believe that the state and society have enough resources to help such families keep their babies.

In August of this year, For Life! announced the collection of more than 1 million signatures in support of the initiative to allocate assistance from the state budget to families with many children. The signature list also has a proposal on the protection of every child's life from the moment of conception.

The number of abortions in Russia has been cut in half over the past four years, Minister of Health Veronika Skvortsova recently stated.

Skvortsova noted that 2016 was a "very significant" year, the number of abortions reducing by 96,300 (13%). In previous years the average drop was 8%, for example, by 67,000 in 2015. "I'm very pleased," she said, "that of these ninety-odd thousand, the number of abortions by desire, that is, without any medical condition, decreased by 72,000."

Comment: Aside from the question of being pro or anti-abortion, Russia's rate of population growth took a very big hit in the turbulent 90's, and only began to recover significantly in 2009; making the drive to grow as a nation - through population - a no doubt continued national goal.

As we read in Wikipedia:

The population of Russia peaked at 148,689,000 in 1991, just before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Low birth rates and abnormally high death rates caused Russia's population to decline at a 0.5% annual rate, or about 750,000 to 800,000 people per year from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. The UN warned in 2005 that Russia's then population of about 143 million could fall by a third by 2050, if trends did not improve.^[17][18]

The decline slowed considerably in the late 2000s, and in 2009 Russia recorded population growth for the first time in 15 years, adding 23,300.^[14][19] Key reasons for the slow current population growth are improving health care, changing fertility patterns among younger women, falling emigration and steady influx of immigrants from ex-USSR countries. In 2012, Russia's population increased by 292,400.^[20]

The number of Russians living in poverty has decreased by 50% since the economic crisis following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the improving economy had a positive impact on the country's low birth rate. The latter rose from its lowest point of 8.27 births per 1000 people in 1999 to 13.3 per 1000 in 2014. Likewise, the fertility rate rose from its lowest point of 1.157 in 1999 to 1.777 in 2015. 2007 marked the highest growth in birth rates that the country had seen in 25 years, and 2009 marked the highest total birth rate since 1991.^[21]

While the Russian birth rate is comparable to that of developed countries, its death rate is much higher, especially among working-age males due to a comparatively high rate of fatalities caused by heart disease and other external causes such as accidents. The Russian death rate in 2010 was 14.3 per 1000 citizens.