Russia now has more abortions than births, to go with the shortest life expectancy in Europe. If an animal population had this problem, they’d be on the Endangered Species List. And Russia doesn’t have offsetting immigration the way Western Europe’s declining societies do.
What’s probably needed in Russia is a religious revival. Maybe the Mormons should get to work there.
UPDATE: I don’t quote him very often (because I don’t agree with him very often), but Pat Buchanan was all over this trend two years ago.
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Or maybe just a truckload of condoms would really help.
Condoms would help stem a decline in population . . . how?
a Christian religious rival.
I think we should encourage our friends to have more children and our enemies to have fewer. Russia is at best ambiguous on the friendship meter. Now if we could only deliver those condoms to the remaining Axis of Evil and Axis of Almost-Evil and explain how to use them, we’d all be better off. (I say “explain how to use them” because I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, where at one point we were going to have the infamous condom-on-the-cucumber video shown to our teens in public school, as if they couldn’t figure out the instructions.)
Noticeably absent from the European Reuters or MosNews stories is the word “adoption” despite 7% of Russian couples who are unable to have children.
Also, it makes clear that convenience is the sole rationale for the abortions – not incest, rape, or health concerns as the American media will have you believe.
I have a piece on this on my site too. Glad to see someone else is paying attention to this. I doubt mainstream media will…
I believe the Russian have put the Mormons on the “cult” list. Heck, they don’t even like the Roman Catholic church going in there.
BTW, wasn’t the world going to blow up due to overpopulation? I seem to recall such dire predictions in the 1970s.
Before suggesting a massive religious change, how about education? To start, preventing unwanted pregnancies will give these women a better chance at having successful pregnancies later. I’m sure this alarming abortion rate has much to do with the six million infertile Russian women. And of course all these abortions are putting more economic strain on an already taxed healthcare system. It’s a terrible downward spiral, and condom use is only a part of solving this problem.
Abortions are certainly a bad thing compared to avoiding the unwanted pregnancies entirely, but the real problem in Russia is the societal suicide of people not being willing to have children.
Maybe I needed to be clearer – there are really two problems at work here: the moral horror of mass abortions, and the macro-societal problem of a declining population. I was mainly talking about the latter – with people dying young and not having children, a population vacuum is being created in the nation with the world’s largest land mass. That’s bad on many levels.
Russia’s population implosion is unusual since death rates are so high, but declining birth rates are destroying many countries, especially Europe and Japan. Birth rates of 1.4 children per woman in Germany and Japan, 1.2 in Italy and Spain, below 2.0 (2.1 is replacement) everywhere in Europe – when children are no longer an investment, or an unintended byproduct of sex, and people have no sense of purpose in life other than their own comfort – the result is culture-death.
If you lived in Russia, would YOU want to have children?