About 800 private Russian clinics no longer offer abortions.

In Russia, there are about 800 private clinics where abortions are no longer offered to women, local media reported this Wednesday. According to Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Patriarchal Commission for Family Affairs, these are medical centers in 14 regions of the country. The last clinic to make that decision, Lukianov told the TASS agency, was the ‘Chance’ chain in the Sverdlovsk region.

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“It is an example of how an initiative of the government and the church, as well as the responsibility and awareness of the business sector, can practically contribute to protecting lives and correcting the demographic situation of our country,” he said. The governor of the Republic of Altai, Andrei Turchak, demanded a week ago that the last clinic performing abortions in the region renounce its license. He affirmed that the Euromedcenter clinic has until the end of this year “enough time to take this legal action and cancel the license to perform abortions”. The Minister of Health of Altai, Altynai Putina, explained that at first nine clinics had these licenses, but after discussing with regional authorities, eight of them canceled them. Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged a few days ago that birth rates in Russia continued to fall and stressed that the Government will implement new support measures to reverse that trend. Last year, the Russian Parliament approved a law prohibiting the propaganda of the ‘childfree’ ideology, which seeks to recognize women’s right not to have children. Russia will allocate 37.5 billion rubles (over 402 million dollars) over the next three years to programs to promote birth rates amid the most serious demographic crisis of the last quarter of a century.

Earlier this year, local media reported on a reduction in the supply of abortion medications in all Russian clinics after the Kremlin is pushing initiatives to promote birth rates in the country, a problem that has been dragging on since 1999 and has worsened with the war in Ukraine.