Doctors who specialize in abortion could be prosecuted

At the traditional medical Hippocratic Forum in Moscow, politicians, doctors, lawyers and church representatives discussed how we can get out of the demographic hole.

Many measures have been proposed, and all of them are quite sharp and debatable: this is to give unborn children all constitutional rights, to ban the sale of emergency contraception, to ban the activity of paid abortion clinics, to increase the responsibility of doctors who persuade pregnant women to this intervention, up to criminal, prohibit the procedure for minors without parental consent.

The event began with a greeting from His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’, which was announced by the head of the press service of the Russian Orthodox Church, Vladimir Legoyda.

Then the floor was given to experts who outlined their vision of this problem. Most experts agree that Russians and Russian women just want to give birth, and the state should help them in the implementation of their childbearing function.

So the ex-Commissioner for Children’s Rights under the President of the Russian Federation, now Vice Speaker of the State Duma Anna Kuznetsova is sure that at least 30% of the citizens of our country dream of not just having many children, but having more than three children in the family. Anna Yurievna herself, as you know, is raising six children with her husband. She believes that just as the military defends our country in the NMD, risking their lives, so in Russia itself today there is a battle for our children. “We need to take care of the child until birth, given the catastrophic situation that we are witnessing,” Kuznetsova stated.

The exact figure is unknown, but on average about half a million abortions are performed in the Russian Federation every year. Most of them – up to 12 weeks at the request of the mother herself. According to numerous surveys, over 70% of the population believes that this is a woman’s constitutional right, and it cannot be taken away and curtailed.

Authoritative experts are sure that this is the result of abortive thinking in the Russians themselves, which has been brought up for more than 100 years. Since then, under Lenin, abortions were allowed. But it’s time for the survival of the population to reconsider this concept.

“Abortion at will must be removed”: the most categorical opponents of artificial termination of pregnancy spoke out extremely harshly and even suggested amending the current legislation of the Russian Federation.

“If life has already arisen, then you need to give birth, and not kill your own child,” MP Ekaterina Engalycheva, for example, is convinced. – I would like the party in power to make several adjustments to the Federal Law 323 “On the basics of protecting the health of citizens in the Russian Federation, article 56” Artificial termination of pregnancy. Leave only medical, social and criminal indicators for obtaining permission for an abortion – remove everything else. One small adjustment and how many lives will we save.”

By the way, the opinion of Ekaterina Engalycheva herself has evolved greatly this year. Previously, she believed that it was enough just to remove abortion from the compulsory health insurance system. “If you want to kill your child – go and pay for it in a private clinic.”

It is not only Engalycheva who speaks about a complete legislative ban on the activities of paid abortion clinics in Russia, this issue has become an acute issue on the agenda, since, according to experts, their activities are not transparent, statistics are hidden, and abortion methods may be illegal. For example, abortions after the permitted dates or without observing the norm of a “week of silence”.

“It is also necessary to ban the retail sale of emergency contraception and oral abortion drugs, the so-called medical abortion drugs. The identified cases of the sale of these drugs by pharmacies to individuals pose a threat to the life and health of women,” said Priest Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Patriarchal Commission for Family Affairs, Protection of Motherhood and Childhood.

The Church considers it necessary in the future to also regulate the concept of “human fetus”, recognize it as a subject of rights and introduce criminal liability for violation of these rights … “to provide for punishment for inducing abortion by supplementing Article 123 of the Criminal Code (Illegal abortion) with a clause on inducing abortion or forced abortion. It is also necessary that, from the point of view of the Criminal Code, advertising of artificial termination of pregnancy is not allowed.

“In order to expand the boundaries of infanticide, so that it extends to a situation where a woman in labor deliberately kills a fetus that has not yet been expelled from her womb, the legislator will need to supplement Article 106 of the Criminal Code (Murder of a newborn child by a mother – ed.) the term “human fetus”, as well as article 111 of the Criminal Code (Intentional infliction of grievous bodily harm – ed.), adding “pregnant woman” and “newborn baby”. I emphasize that there is now a discussion about this. Before making proposals, it is necessary to discuss this in the expert community,” the representative of the Russian Orthodox Church concluded.

But in addition to forcing our women to give birth – after all, we know how to force, we need to convince them to do it voluntarily and with joy, so that pregnant women are sure that after giving birth they will not go around the world with a child, but will be needed by the same state . To do this, it is necessary to provide them with all the conditions for education, especially when it comes to single mothers. Help should be comprehensive and differentiated. Only in this scenario can the effectiveness of state support measures be achieved. It’s no secret that today having many children is largely seen as synonymous with poverty and lack of rights. Families with many children depend on officials who control them, on state payments, since mothers often sit with their children and do not work. Children in these families are often taken away by guardianship authorities. A priori, it is believed that families with many children are dysfunctional. What are marginals. And the approach to them is the same. So, the other day the requirement for the mandatory installation of fire detectors in the housing of “large and dysfunctional families” came into effect. As if it goes without saying that where there are many children, there is a danger to the lives of others. This point, the participants of the Hippocratic Forum believe, must be changed.

“Having many children should become a sign of family well-being,” says Grigory Saifullin, Project Director of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives.

Therefore, the organization of assistance to such families must also be approached individually.

“The social approach is when we prevent poverty in low-income families who cannot provide themselves with the necessary income. Compensatory – measures aimed at compensating for the costs of the child and the shortfall in income of the mother who cares for him. And there are also demographic measures that help speed up the family to realize the need to have a child. This is a question of improving the living conditions of the family, increasing the mobility of a large family, and buying a car. These approaches should not be mixed. For example, when we mix demographic measures with social measures, it turns out that fictitious divorces are provoked in order to receive benefits, in the future the family loses the foundations for its development and the socialization of children. People lose their motives for active economic activity, because if their income exceeds the prescribed by at least 200 rubles, they lose the right to benefits. There should be a common framework for all these approaches, but everything should be individual,” sums up Grigory Saifullin.