Over the past two decades, Russia has seen an uptick in policies limiting access to abortion. Several new measures were introduced in 2023, including stricter regulation of medical abortion drugs, laws imposing liability for ‘inducement to abort’ in the Republic of Mordovia and Tver Oblast, and some private clinics’ refusal to offer abortions in certain regions. In recent years, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has played an increasingly important role in the debate over restricting access to abortion. But has the ROC always been so radically anti-abortion and pro–‘life from conception’? And how has post-Soviet international cooperation between Orthodox actors and the Western religious right shaped the ROC’s current position? Gender researcher Anna Sidorevich asks the historian Nadezhda Beliakova.
Verstka recently warned its readers that the Ministry of Health was losing ground in its opposition to the ROC on the issue of abortion. Until recently, the ROC’s main demands included the removal of abortion from Russia’s state healthcare coverage and a ban on the procedure being carried out in private clinics. The latter initiative has already been partially implemented in Mordovia, Tatarstan and Chelyabinsk Oblast. In early November, private clinics in Crimea stopped offering abortions, while non-state facilities in Kursk Oblast also ceased performing medical abortions. Deputies in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast voted yes on the first reading of a proposed ban on abortion in private clinics.
In November, Patriarch Kirill called for Mordovia and Tver Oblast’s laws prohibiting ‘inducement to abort’ to be replicated at the federal level. In addition, in late October, at a round table on abortion held at the Duma Committee on Health Protection, the ROC presented several new proposals for reforming article 56, ‘Pregnancy Termination’, of the law ‘On the Fundamentals of Health Protection of Citizens of the Russian Federation’. For instance, the Church suggests reducing the time limit for abortion from 12 to 8 weeks, and from 22 to 12 weeks in cases of rape. Other lawmakers have proposed taking away women’s autonomy in pregnancy decision-making, currently guaranteed by the aforementioned law, by requiring them to obtain the written consent of a spouse for an abortion or, if below the age of majority, of a parent or guardian.
Recently, Russian Orthodox Church officials have increasingly used the demographic crisis to justify anti-abortion measures, i.e. a discourse of political power that is not directly related to religion as such. Patriarch Kirill’s recent statement that a ban on ‘inducing’ women to have abortions could increase the population ‘like a magic wand’ is particularly telling. Nadezhda Beliakova, a historian who worked as a senior researcher at the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences before the war in Ukraine, also highlights the ROC’s political logic. According to her, Patriarch Kirill approaches abortion issues ‘not as a Christian figure, not as a pastor or family counsellor’, but as an official promoting the state’s agenda.
‘Historically, the ROC leadership has had a weak position in the state and society, and the current demographic crisis and war present an opportunity for church leaders to demonstrate their value to the authorities’, Beliakova explains.
The exclusively political nature of the ROC’s anti-abortion rhetoric today is also demonstrated by the fact that the Church only uses pro-life theses when it comes to abortion, while ignoring other, less politically favourable contexts. ‘For example, the Patriarch does not speak out about the right to life of civilian members of his flock in Ukraine or in Russia’s border regions; we don’t hear him speaking out against child abuse or the torture of prisoners’, Beliakova notes.
But to understand the ROC’s current anti-abortion stance, one must consider not only the Russian, but also the international context.
The Church now holds that abortion is ‘the arbitrary taking of a human being’s life, that is to say, murder’.
The ROC regards embryos as human beings with the right to a personal identity, life and development, and demands that these rights be enshrined in law. Thus, Patriarch Kirill used this argument in his speech to the Federation Council in May 2022 in favour of removing abortion from state healthcare-covered services and banning the procedure in private clinics.
Historically, however, such rhetoric has not been typical of the ROC. According to Nadezhda Beliakova, throughout the Soviet period, when abortion was essentially the primary means of birth control, neither the Patriarch nor his predecessors spoke out against abortion. The Patriarch’s modern rhetoric in defence of the unborn is a late-twentieth-century discourse borrowed from Catholics and conservative American evangelicals after the collapse of the USSR, and has little to do with the ROC’s actual context today.
From the ancient times of Rus’ until the Revolution, abortion – known as plodoizgnanie, ‘expelling the fetus’ – was considered a sin and regulated by the Church through special collections of canon law known as epithymiyniks (from the Greek epithymia), which prescribed the means of spiritual redemption for serious transgressions. The Nomocanon of Saint John IV the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople (582–595) is considered the Orthodox Church’s primary collection of canon law. As Beliakova has written, most editions of this book include a section called ‘On Women’, which defines expelling fetuses and mixing various kinds of potions as specifically female sins. The book considers the expulsion of a fetus to be a double murder, as it kills the fetus and endangers the mother’s life. However, due to the widespread nature of this sin, the penalty prescribed for it was 10 years of excommunication, rather than 20 years, as was the case for ‘willful’ murder. A woman’s guilt was increased if she was married; if a ‘loose woman’ aborted, her penance was only 9 years.
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Importantly, though, there were other rules governing women’s daily lives in addition to those about abortion. For example, canon law also prescribed that women not receive communion during the postpartum period – childbirth was considered unclean. This traditional view of ‘female impurity’ has its roots in Judaism. Church law also imposed fairly strict regulations on sexual relations, taking a highly negative view of adultery and providing clear guidelines for family life. According to Beliakova, the rules enshrined in the epithymiyniks were the Church’s response to everyday practices. They represented a set of measures developed in a particular cultural and historical context and applied to both women and men.
The ROC’s singling out of one topic from the whole of church disciplinary literature – abortion – at the cost of all others is purely political decision-making.
Beliakova also points out how the Patriarch addresses the state as his partner in dialogue, not as a part of his ‘flock’. According to her, the Russian Orthodox Church does not have the moral authority in Russian society to affect its attitudes, especially towards family and reproductive behaviour.
Nadezhda Beliakova [ES1] asserts that the Russian Orthodox Church’s current emphasis on protecting life from conception lacks roots in traditional Orthodox teachings. One supporting example is the prayer for stillborn infants or those who died shortly after birth which was discussed at the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church (1917–1918):
‘Discussions of this prayer focused on grieving parents, particularly mothers who had lost their children, emphasising the need for the Church to offer them solace through a dedicated prayer. The prayer was intended for conscientious people grieving for the unbaptised, who, according to doctrine, could not be saved. The Church was talking about parents, their behaviour, and their responsibilities.’
The ROC’s current focus on the embryo and defense of its right to life are, according to Beliakova, based less on Orthodox rhetoric than Western churches’ pro-life arguments, which rely on the achievements of modern natural science.
The pro-life rhetoric of the Russian Orthodox Church today is, in essence, a carbon copy of Western religious conservatism.
The mass pro-life movement in the West is often traced back to the coalition of conservative religious groups in the United States known as the ‘New Right’ which emerged in response to the legalisation of abortion in the 1970s following Roe v. Wade. America saw an unprecedented politicisation of abortion as Republicans used the issue to win additional support from evangelicals. As Beliakova points out, American evangelicals had borrowed the construct in turn from their competitor, the Catholic Church, which had traditionally embraced its central idea. Western pro-life discourse was then imported into Russia in the 1990s, in the context of the post-Soviet discussion of abortion as a social scourge that had ruined the lives of millions of women. It was at this same time that Russia imported the now-familiar construct of ‘traditional values’.
The pro-life movement’s ground zero was the 1995 founding of the World Congress of Families (WCF) by public figures from Russia and the United States. The WCF is a US-based organisation with a worldwide presence representing the right-wing conservative branch of American Christianity. The organisation is dedicated to promoting conservative family values around the world, effectively exporting the strategies and ideas at the heart of America’s culture wars between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘progressives’. In Russia, as sociologist Kristina Stöckl notes, the WCF’s activity has been supported by conservative factions within the Russian Orthodox Church, setting up ‘Russian Orthodox conservatives as partners of the Christian Right in the West’. Thus, the language and strategies employed by Russian authorities in today’s domestic struggle for Russian ‘traditional values’ and in confrontation with the West are the results not of a historical adherence to Orthodox tradition but of selective modern exchanges with the West; they are themselves an effect of globalisation.
In addition, according to Nadezhda Beliakova, Patriarch Kirill’s radical anti-abortion rhetoric may be due in part to his long tenure as Chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations (1989–2009), and, in particular, his contact with the Pontifical Academy for Life. The Pontifical Academy for Life is an autonomous institution founded in 1994 by John Paul II, known for his anti-abortion stance, and dedicated to the ‘study, information and formation on the principal problems of biomedicine and of law’ within the framework of Christian morality and the directives of the Church’s Magisterium. The organisation has traditionally opposed abortion. Until 2016, member candidates were required to sign a declaration upon joining the academy. This declaration asserted that ‘from the moment an embryo is formed until death, it is one and the same person who reaches maturity and dies’. Last year, the organisation hailed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had legalised abortion in the country.
According to Beliakova, the ROC’s current anti-abortion discourse is an attempt to earn a place on the international traditionalist agenda:
‘Russian Orthodox Church leaders are espousing bold slogans that are divorced from Russia’s social reality, not based in it. In my opinion, these slogans are entirely driven by an international agenda, particularly the global culture wars. Both the Patriarch and certain factions within the Russian Orthodox Church are clearly promoting an agenda, previously outlined by the presidential administration, that positions Russia as a potential centre of international traditionalism. These anti-abortion statements are a message to the global audience. They’re rolling out an abortion restriction agenda in order to put themselves on the (contradictory and heterogeneous) traditionalist map. These statements let the Patriarch signal, “We’re on your side. You’ve got genuine pro-life social movements, an agenda, right-wing parties, an environment that fosters this discourse, and you see yourselves as an oppressed minority?” Well, ROC officials’ statements are trying to say, the Russian government supports our agenda, which means Russia can become a bastion of traditionalism.’
‘The ROC does not actually have a social base for the pro-life movement’, Beliakova believes.
The Russian Orthodox Pro-Life Initiative has historically been a marginalised movement, and according to the observations of anthropologist Sonja Luehrmann, not all of its female members had large families or were married. Luehrmann’s study indicates that female participants in the pro-life movement exhibit a wide range of family structures. For instance, while some women interviewed by an anthropologist expressed a belief that they should bear and raise all children ‘God sends them’, others used contraception. Some women of the older generation were widows, while others were married to spouses who did not share their religious beliefs. Among the young women activists were both those who sought to demonstrate obedience to their husbands and those who avoided male company entirely, or were divorced and raising children solo. Thus, the idealised notion of a hierarchical, patriarchal large family, which the female participants of the movement, as described by Luehrmann, aspire to, is projected onto an imagined past and does not accurately represent the actual diversity of family structures and practices.
The traditional, patriarchal Russian family is now an ideological construct imposed from above under conditions of demographic crisis, Nadezhda Beliakova believes:
‘Right-wing traditionalists have no social base in Russia. They have no one to rely on. While in post-socialist Eastern European countries such as Poland and Croatia, right-wing movements have a social base, in Russia, “strong Orthodox families” are only trotted out during the Patriarch’s RIA Novosti interviews. Don’t count on them suddenly becoming common – especially not during a war. How can you talk about families given Russia’s dire demographic asymmetry which has only been exacerbated by sending men of childbearing age off to war? The only social groups whose numbers that will grow are widows and disabled veterans.’Article by Anna Sidorevich, a historian of feminism(s) and gender and a PhD candidate at the Sciences Po Centre for History
Article by Anna Sidorevich, a historian of feminism(s) and gender and a PhD candidate at the Sciences Po Centre for History
