The Russian Orthodox Church proposed to introduce criminal penalties for inducing women to have an abortion

Criminally punish those who encourage pregnant women to have an abortion, recommend that they undergo such a procedure in clinics. The corresponding proposal was made by the Patriarchal Commission on Family Issues, Protection of Motherhood and Childhood of the Russian Orthodox Church. They also proposed to toughen the responsibility for artificial termination of pregnancy. This was announced by the chairman of the commission, priest Fyodor Lukyanov, at a meeting of the VI Hippocratic Medical Forum.

“It is necessary to provide for punishment for inducing abortion by supplementing Article 123 of the Criminal Code [РФ “Незаконное проведение искусственного прерывания беременности”] Pparagraph 4, which provides for punishment for inducing or forcing a woman to have an abortion” he said..

In the punishment in Part 1 of Article 123 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Performing artificial termination of pregnancy by a person who does not have a higher medical education in the relevant profile”), Lukyanov proposed increasing the maximum amount of fines from the current 80 thousand rubles. up to 150 thousand rubles, and the term of corrective labor – from two to five years. He noted that now there is no concept of “criminal abortion” in the legislation, respectively, law enforcement agencies are not interested in this type of criminal business.

“The legal concept of “criminal abortion” should be developed with the participation of representatives of state bodies, with the involvement of experts from religious organizations, with reference to the scientific works of modern researchers in the field of biology, medicine, philology”Lukyanov noted.

According to the representative of the Russian Orthodox Church, illegal abortions today most often occur in private clinics. He pointed to a recent international study by the Red Cross, according to which 70% of inspected private medical institutions found violations in this area. They do not observe a week of silence, do not organize psychologist’s conversations with pregnant women and do not tell them about the negative consequences caused by artificial termination of pregnancy.

As Life wrote earlier, the State Duma declared it impossible to legally ban abortions without the consent of husbands. Nina Ostanina, Chairman of the Committee on Family, Women and Children, commenting on the initiative of the Russian Orthodox Church, noted that it would not be possible to implement this now – because of the low provision of young families.