Abortion and Birth Control Policies and Practices Differ in
Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine According to official statistics,
in 1990 all three countries had very high abortion rates. Over
the subsequent two decades, Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all
achieved a significant decrease in the number of abortions.
However, the speed of this improvement that was nearly equal in
all the three countries during the 1990s started to diverge in
the early 2000s, showing a steeper progress in Ukraine and
especially in Belarus compared to Russia. In Belarus the annual
speed of reduction in abortion rates accelerated from 8% to 11%,
in Russia it slowed down to 5%, while in Ukraine it continued at
the same annual pace of 6%. As a result, today Russia exhibits
substantially higher abortion rates compared to Belarus and
Ukraine, whose figures are comparable to those of the United
States, England and Wales, Sweden, and France. Why such
differences between Russia and its Slavic sister-countries? In
the former Soviet Union, the three