Over the past 15 years, registered abortions in Russia have fallen from 1.01 million to 235,700, that is, by more than four times, Vedomosti calculated based on data from Rosstat, the Ministry of Health, and expert estimates. That is 20 abortions per 100 births instead of 56; formally, Russia showed the sharpest decline among the world’s 100 largest economies and ranked 30th.
The authors stress that such a comparison is conditional: countries keep records differently, and in a number of states abortions are banned or more restricted than in Russia. In such cases, some procedures do not appear in the statistics, and the right to abortion on demand exists in only 53 of the 100 largest economies.
The publication also notes that in Europe, except for Germany, the overall trend is toward an increase in abortions, while the dynamics in Russia are more similar to Morocco and Singapore. In the United States, the number of abortions per 100 births fell from 26 to 21, and the highest abortion rates in the model are in China, Chile, Azerbaijan, Taiwan, Argentina, and India; the lowest are in Qatar, Turkey, Israel, Singapore, and Bahrain.
In 2025, according to the calculations, there were no more than 422,000 pregnancy terminations for various reasons and indications in Russia, of which 236,000 were abortions. Miscarriages, including spontaneous abortions and missed miscarriages, totaled 186,000, or 44%.
Over 15 years, the share of miscarriages rose from 15% to 44%, and the number of such cases per 100 births increased from 10.1 to 15.8. Natalia Dolgushina, the chief freelance specialist in women’s reproductive health at the Ministry of Health, links the rise in the share of miscarriages to the decline in the number of abortions as such, while journalists also attribute it to the fact that the average maternal age has reached 29.
Russian authorities first set the reduction in abortions as a goal in 2007, and Vladimir Putin called them a “major problem”. By 2020, the plan was to bring the rate down to 18.5 abortions per 1,000 women, and the target was exceeded: in 2020, Russia had 16 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age, and by 2025 — 12.4.
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