THE OSSUARY THAT LENIN BUILT:

Abortion in Russia: No Big Deal (Anna Arutunyan, 11/25/04, The Moscow News)

There may be no sex in Russia, so goes a Soviet urban legend. And somehow, with abortions outnumbering live births nearly 2 to 1, if you’re a Russian woman and never had one, you’re a statistical non-entity.

The women I spoke to — stoic, intelligent matrons obviously with other things on their minds besides talking their husbands into using condoms — took it for granted that they had friends who’d chide them with “I’ve had thirty abortions already, what’s the big deal?” when they had to make that trip to the clinic.

And, according to one gynecologist who has been practicing for 45 years, there was certainly no reason to blanche when a girl told you that “I’d rather just have abortions than not have satisfying sex.”

Western media — like the Washington Post — put Russia at number three for its abortion rate, just after Cuba and Romania. Conservative think tanks like the Rand Corporation are more blatant: Russia has the highest abortion rate in the world.

Statistics, like women, are fickle; and yet whatever numbers you look at, the rates are staggering. According to a compilation from the Demographic Yearbook of the European Council and an analogous Demographic Yearbook by the United Nations, Russia is the only nation in the world where abortions consistently outnumbered live births by a ratio of about 2 to 1. In 1970, for example, there were 1.9 million births and 4.8 million abortions. Today, with more access to real contraceptives, that number has decreased: for every live birth there are between 1.3 and 1.5 abortions, depending on the statistics you look at.

No decent society can emerge from such a culture of death.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 27, 2004 7:05 AM