The State Duma proposed taking written permission from fathers for abortion

The embryo has a soul and has civil rights, says the deputy

Lately, there has been ongoing talk about how we can increase the birth rate. The State Duma Health Protection Committee proposed ready-made solutions. It is necessary, firstly, to ask for the official consent of the woman’s father or guardian for any termination of pregnancy. And secondly, tighten the timing of abortions.

At a round table in the Duma, amendments to federal legislation and the Family Code were discussed. Deputies proposed introducing a ban on abortions in private clinics. This is not new – previously such an initiative was made by the first deputy chairman of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children, Tatyana Butskaya. True, representatives of the Orthodox Church, on the contrary, advocate removing abortions from the compulsory health insurance system and delegating them to private providers. So understand what to do if both proposals work…

Socialist MP Dmitry Gusev (globally involved in political technology) said that the embryo in the womb already has a soul. Referring to this and also the Family Code, which asserts equal rights for fathers and mothers, the deputy demanded that fathers also decide whether to have an abortion. And the idea that “my body is my business” is fundamentally wrong and does not fit the agenda.

The church has issued clinical recommendations. The Russian Orthodox Church proposes to reduce the period for permissible surgical termination of pregnancy from 12 to 8 weeks. Before this, the woman must have an ultrasound and show the fetal heartbeat on the monitor.

This measure, according to clergy, is designed to reduce the number of curettages that are harmful to a woman’s health, in favor of medical abortions. Which, in turn, was called for by Health Minister Mikhail Murashko just a month ago.

And one more clarification from the Russian Orthodox Church – written consent to an abortion must be from the woman’s spouse or one of the parents (guardians).

But the head of the charitable foundation for the preservation and strengthening of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, Inga Yumasheva, believes that without a complete ban on abortion in the country, it is impossible to win the SVO.

The plans voiced at the legislative level caused a serious resonance, including on the Internet. People are also not happy about the clearly visible patriarchal orientation of the statements. Many directly point out that there is an attack on women’s rights. “What does permission from a guardian or husband mean in relation to an adult with legal capacity? What to do if the father is unknown or fled into the sunset at the first signs of pregnancy? “What other equal rights are there? They can only appear when men bear, give birth and feed, and become equal to women in the matter of childbearing.” Many were also confused by the fact that the embryo has rights, but the woman does not.

Many people remember that the total alimony debt in the Russian Federation is 156 billion rubles. These are official data from the Federal Bailiffs Service for 2022. What kind of equal responsibility are we talking about?..

– In Russia, according to statistics, there are 5.6 million mothers raising children alone. 22% of children are born outside of official marriage, in civil cohabitation, says social psychologist Valery Raushinsky. – In such a situation, forcing fathers to sign formal consents is a very strange initiative. We will immediately put millions of people in a position of social vulnerability and dependence. Or we push them into the shadow zone, into the same underground abortion clinics.

“The Russian Orthodox Church does not have a canonical opinion about when a soul enters a person,” comments religious scholar Dmitry Fomin. — The V Ecumenical Council decided that the soul is created together with the body. Another version is on the 40th day after conception, this concept is also accepted in Judaism. Although it is believed that the soul is finally formed within 9 months. Some early Christian priests believed that the body was created before the soul. Clement of Alexandria said that the soul already lives in the mother’s womb, and the father brings the Holy Spirit into it with the seed… In Islam, depending on the current, abortion is either prohibited or permitted after 40 or 80 days. Or at the end of the 4th lunar month, this is approximately 120 days.

In 2021, answering a tricky theological question about the soul in the body, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the department for external church relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, made it clear that the embryo has a soul. “At the moment of conception, when the embryo appears, it has all human rights, including the right to birth,” the clergyman said. They say that this is why abortion cannot be done, it is “inadmissible at any stage.”