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Amid the war against Ukraine and a declining birth rate, the Kremlin has introduced a new holiday: Pregnant Women’s Day. To mark the occasion, maternity clinics, hospitals, and even vocational schools hold workshops on newborn care, share information about state support programs, and hand out gifts.
Officials hope to address the country’s demographic crisis by reframing pregnancy as a public contribution rather than a private milestone, but sociologists warn that such efforts do little to change the material realities facing young families.
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In other news, it is said that a Russian convent hands out plastic fetuses to women in anti-abortion campaign in in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.
The initiative was held in shopping centers, libraries, at city festivals, and on university campuses. Volunteers and activists from from the Odigitrievsky Convent claimed afterwards that their efforts had “saved 658 lives,” a local Telegram news channel reported.
In addition to distributing the plastic fetuses, the convent’s volunteers reportedly held one-on-one conversations with women in which they warned them that abortion would be an “irreversible mistake.”
The Odigitrievsky Convent has run other anti-abortion “counseling” campaigns in the past. Additionally, officials in the city of Ryazan have voiced support for similar anti-abortion initiatives involving the distribution of fetus models.