Apparently two members of the Russian Duma (the lower house) introduced a bill to make abortion illegal. No Christian fundamentalism here, they claim it's just to counter the demographic crisis the country is facing. To an uneducated mind (or one of low IQ) the maths is simple: abolishing abortions in a country where there are more abortions than births is the one solution to a declining population that risks driving Russia to extinction.
Hmm, how come I'm not impressed by this reasoning? Restricting abortion requires firstly a strong family culture and a society that doesn't burden single parents. Russia lacks both. Most families are kept together by the women, sometimes the elderly ones, while it is not uncommon for men to just abandon their wives or fiancees when they are about to give birth or when the child is still very young. With life expectancy for males decreasing steadily due to several factors among which alcoholism, having children is not a matter of choice but a gamble for women, where the stake is their own future.
One might say that's fine, but abortions aren't about married couples. Fine then, what's the deal for a single parent in today's Russia? The State doesn't provide anything reasonable in terms of welfare, state schools are still going strong but the job market is weak, and in the most faraway parts of the country there's nothing to do but drink. Top universities are impossible to get into without either being a genius or being an able briber, and males get taken into the army as soon as they're 18. And we haven't addressed the parent's side yet. Try combining enough jobs to pay for living and bills and raising a kid in Russia, especially outside the metropolitan areas.
As usual, mediocre pseudo-politicians refuse to see the roots of the problem and just go the easy way. All at the expense of the vulnerable, whose voice is always the last one to be heard in countries where civic society stopped existing ages ago and is only now starting to form again.
5 comments:
"Most families are kept together by the women, sometimes the elderly ones, while it is not uncommon for men to just abandon their wives or fiancees when they are about to give birth or when the child is still very young."
That's not the type of claim one makes without providing some data to back it up. And which is chicken and egg? Decades of cradle to grave statism may have made men redundant in some aspects, such as breadwinner and security, so I'd argue it is the statism that causes whatever degree of family breakup there is in Russia.
In any event, if you don't have data may I humbly suggest you are just offering an opinion.
Half of my family lives there, and these stories are all too common. Although healthy, united and hardworking families are the majority (I hope) the proportion of broken homes is very frustrating.
Mind you I kept the post moderate by using "it is not uncommon". However, I will try to carve out some solid data, though it might be in Russian.
80 years of statism made Soviet society strongly incompatible with a wild capitalist economy like the one that ensued after the fall of the USSR. Still, living for quite a few years in the country would make the prominent role of women in keeping the household running. Heard of the institutionalized "babushka" in every family? That was my point.
If you give me some way of sending you any data I dig up I will be happy to submit those to you.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE1D6113CF932A15753C1A963958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print --NYT isn't the local tabloid.
http://64.233.179.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:RDTkbtatpLgJ:wbln0018.worldbank.org/Research/workpapers.nsf/bd04ac9da150d30385256815005076ce/6da757308124ea4a852568a800706e9a/%24FILE/wps2300.pdf+ -- Good references
http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/june2006/shrinking_population.html --some data
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/2283.html##7 -- on prenatal care in Russia in the 90's, although I doubt it has improved significantly over these years.
I would also recommend books and papers by Murray Feshbach, which I read some years ago but are impossible to fetch freely on the net.
Hopefully you are convinced that I'm not just expressing a wild opinion I made up.
Thanks for the links, particularly the second one.
Seems strange that the Russian people would survive, evolve, and prosper for millenia, only to... abandon their children? Was this a problem under the Tsar?
One of the articles notes that often the single mothers are working moms with university degrees; seems rather strange that education appears to be correlated with single parenthood in Russia. In other countries it is the other way around.
I still think you come down too hard on men. Yes, you've provided data on the "how", yet appear wholly unconcerned with the "why". I don't need to see a study from Harvard to confirm what I know: socialism causes the breakdown of the family. This is by design as per the Communist Manifesto. Russian men did not one day randomly decide to abandon their duties, nor do they have the history of child abandonment prior to 1917, and I think it's important to point that out.
Apologies if this sounds combative, such is the nature of internet communication.
Lacking a sociology education I cannot answer the question of why this abandonment occurs. Statistics from Tsarist Russia are murky, therefore I can't provide any opinion on whether this was a problem at that time.
The university degree issue implies that the problem is more dangerous than it might seem, because it pervades larger chunks of society than just the ones excluded from the benefits of economic and social improvement.
This might sound preposterous, but I would like to offer an explanation for why men in Russia seem to have been slacking off their duties in the last century or so.
World War One wiped out five million Russians, most of them soldiers. The ensuing civil war further reduced the male populace. The famines struck both sexes. Then WW2 wiped out 27 million Russians, again a lot of them being men. Factor in the regime's repressions and we get a lot of boys growing up without male role models, their fathers being either dead on the war front or in a Gulag.
Now the plague is alcoholism. But with the growing unacceptability of such behavior I guess it will sooner or later start diminishing.
Outcome: wars, unrest and dictatorship wiped out familial role models. Peaceful times, albeit slowly, are bringing up more youngsters with some good parenting. Slowly, I hope, the society will return to normalcy.
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