Pregnant women cast their ballot papers at a maternity hospital in in Kemerovo, a city in western Siberia, on 2 December 2007. Photo: EPA/MAXIM SHIPENKOV
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova announced the creation of a federal pregnancy register at the first meeting of the Presidential Council for the Implementation of Demographic and Family Policy in Moscow, the Kremlin reported on Thursday.
Due to be operational by March, the register will allow the Russian authorities to “monitor the demographic situation” by keeping a record of all the pregnant women in the country, their state of health, and the state of health of newborn children, Golikova said.
In a sign of how seriously the Kremlin views Russia’s demographic crisis, Vladimir Putin also addressed the council’s inaugural meeting, telling its members that the state should promote the importance of parenthood to Russian citizens and stress that “happiness should not be postponed for a later date”.
Putin added that supporting families and creating conditions for the birth of as many children as possible in Russia was the single most important area of national policy. “Families with three or more children should become the norm, the natural way of life in our country,” he said.
Nevertheless, Putin went on to say that placing “any pressure” on individuals to have more children was “unacceptable" and that such decisions should remain private for each family.
Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko used the council meeting to propose pegging a family’s mortgage rate to the number of children it had in another attempt at stimulating population growth, according to business daily Vedomosti.
Russia has introduced a number of measures in its attempts to stimulate childbirth and stigmatise childlessness and abortion. These have included doctors dissuading teenage girls from terminating unwanted pregnancies to making access to abortion more difficult altogether.
According to the latest available statistics from the World Bank, Russia’s fertility rate in 2023 was 1.4 births per woman, well below the 2.1 children per woman considered to be replacement level in developed countries. Since then, the war in Ukraine has seen over 250,000 Russian fatalities, the mass emigration of young Russians fleeing mobilisation, and the country’s worsening appeal to immigrants, who for decades have offset the declining population.
