The Opening of a Russian Front in the Abortion Wars

by Merle Hoffman, On The Issues Magazine

On Thursday, the New York Times’ Sophia Kishkovsky published a piece about alarming news that’s been buzzing in reproductive rights circles for the last couple of weeks – Russia has embraced their very own anti-choice movement, and it looks strikingly like ours here in the U.S.

This is not news to me as I encountered the nascent Russian anti-choice movement 20 years ago when I attempted to open the first feminist medical center in Moscow, Choices East. My desire to create a Russian version of Choices in New York was sparked when I was confronted with a 35-year-old Russian woman who came to me for her 36th abortion. At that time, abortion was the major form of birth control in the former Soviet Union, and many immigrants had ten or twenty before coming to Choices. I listened in mute rage to one story after another of lives blighted by sexually transmitted diseases, domestic violence and hopelessness. For these women, the issue of abortion posed no questions of morality, ethics, or women’s rights versus fetal life. My patient regarded her multiple abortions pragmatically, as a way of “just getting cleaned out.”

Like so many of her compatriots, she was violently opposed to using birth control. Most Russian gynecologists promoted the idea that the pill caused cancer, and preached the virtues of repeat abortions. Of course, the fact that many of them subsidized their three-dollar-a-month salaries by doing abortions on kitchen tables might well have had an influence on their thinking. more on >>

Source: http://www.rhrealitycheck.org