Adolescent Pregnancy in Russia

Abstract

Adolescent pregnancy rates in the U.S. and Russia are among the highest for developed countries. In Russia, the birthrate for 15–19-year-olds in 1990 was 55 per 1,000 girls. It dropped into the high 20s and held there through early 2000s increasing again to 30.2 per 1,000 women in 2009. Scholarly discussions of teen pregnancy in Russia usually refer to “low contraceptive culture” among adolescents (or Russians in general). In part, this is because attempts to implement sex education on the federal level met with a potent backlash in the 1990s, thereby hampering efforts to improve youth’s knowledge of sexual health topics through classroom instruction. There are, however, some signs that contraceptive knowledge among gynecologists is improving, and thus, the quality of individual contraceptive counseling is also increasing. In addition to the general medical risks of teenage pregnancy that hold true across countries, teenage pregnancy in Russia takes place within the context of high rates of sexually transmitted infections, particularly syphilis, and HIV. Syphilis rates in the 2000s remain higher than in the 1980s and 1990s. Nearly a million Russians are HIV-positive. Women are 20 % of those infected, and of those women, 30 % are teens 15–17 years old. Russian law in 2013 stipulates that women older than 15 years old are entitled to access anonymous sexual health services, including abortion, without parental permission. In practice, however, fears about anonymity linger from the Soviet era, leading women to seek unsafe abortions. Finally, in response to what some have deemed a demographic “crisis,” the government implemented a baby bonus to promote population growth in 2007, awarding women who had a second or subsequent child “maternal capital” for improved housing, the child’s future education or the mother’s pension equivalent to about $10,000. It is unclear whether such an incentive could lead to an increase in birthrates among adolescents as well as adult women.