Abortion in Russia

Abortion in Russia is legal as an elective procedure up to the 12th week of pregnancy, and in special circumstances at later stages.^[1]

Following the takeover of Russia by the Bolsheviks, in 1920 the Russian Soviet Republic under Lenin became the first country in the world in the modern era to allow abortion in all circumstances, but over the course of the 20th century, the legality of abortion changed more than once, with a ban on unconditional abortions being enacted again from 1936 to 1955, which from then on it was legalised again. Due to this, the country gained a termed "abortion culture".^[2] Russian abortions peaked in the middle of the 1960s, with a total of 5,463,300 abortions being performed in 1965.^[3] In the entire Soviet Union, from its legalisation, until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, over 260 million abortions took place (mostly in Russia).

In 2009, Russia reported 1.2 million abortions,^[4] out of a population of 143 million people. In 2020, Russia had decreased its number of abortions to 450 thousand.^[5]