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The Moscow News. In the days of the Soviet Union, abortions were shockingly common

In the days of the Soviet Union, abortions were shockingly common. "My grandmother once told me that she had 12 abortions," Dasha, a Muscovite in her late 20s, told The Moscow News. "My former landlady - she's 67 now - and I once had a conversation about having children. She can't remember exactly how many abortions she had, but she thinks it was somewhere around 18."

Abortion was widely used as a form of birth control in the Soviet Union. The Health Ministry registered 5.5 million abortions, compared to just 2 million live births, in 1965. A study done in St. Petersburg just after the fall of the Soviet Union found that only 14 percent of women aged 15 to 65 had never had an abortion.

It's not surprising that Russia developed a reputation, perpetuated by the dismal tales of its past, for fostering a rampant "abortion culture" - and that stereotype's still around today. In "What To Expect When No One's Expecting," a book published in April, American author Jonathan Last wrote that Russia's high abortion rate "might be the most grisly statistic the world has ever seen. It suggests a society that no longer has the will to live."

Last, regrettably, based his analysis on abortion statistics from 2002.

Russia's demographic picture today, in fact, is starkly different - even optimistic.

"Our abortion numbers are decreasing," announced Yelena Baibarina, the director of the Department of Medical Care for Children and Obstetrics at the Health Ministry, in an interview with RIA Novosti in early August. "In 2008 there were 73.1 abortions for every 100 live births; in 2012 there were 49.7."

The Health Ministry's statistics are not complete, as they exclude abortions performed in private clinics. But even statistics from Rosstat (the State Statistics Service), which count operations done both in public and private healthcare facilities, show that the quantity of abortions here have halved since 2000 - from 2.1 million in 2000 to 1.1 million in 2011, Rosstat's most recently published year.

Russia's abortion rate is still comparatively quite high - more than double Western Europe's average of about 22 abortions per 100 live births, from World Health Organization 2011 statistics. But demographic studies show that Russian abortion numbers are dropping steadily, even approaching levels comparable to those of the West.

What's responsible for the turnaround?

Experts say - birth control.

"Perhaps the most important factor [in the abortion decrease] is the emergence of the market for contraceptives and information about them," Viktoria Sakevich, a demographer at the Higher School of Economics, told The Moscow News.

In the Soviet Union, birth control was widely unavailable, low-quality condoms being the only accessible barrier against unwanted pregnancy. As more methods of contraception were brought to Russia, the rate of abortions decreased in turn.

"The [abortion] rate started a downward trend after the '60s that increased after the wide introduction of IUDs [intrauterine devices] in the late '80s," Boris Denisov, a pro-choice activist and Moscow State University demographer, told The Moscow News. "It increased even more after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the market of pharmaceuticals [and oral contraceptives] appeared."

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