A NEW THREAT TO FREEDOM?

Sian Norris reports on the new threat to abaortion rights in Ukraine

In June this year, the Ivano-Frankivsk City Council put in a public appeal to Ukraine’s RADA to suspend the right to safe and legal abortion across the country, in a move women’s rights activists have warned is a firing shot to a permanent ban.

The men behind the application claimed that Ukraine is at risk of a demographic crisis. The country’s birth rate has dramatically decreased since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, and last year it had the highest death rate in the world. But banning abortion to try and resolve a demographic crisis is straight out of the fascist playbook, as my book Bodies Under Siege explores. It positions women’s bodies as a resource, with women pinned to reproductive labour in service of the nation and race.

Abortion bans are an attack on women’s freedom. They demand that women give up our rights over our own bodies, and place our bodies under external control. The bans limit women’s opportunities – for employment, education, and future decisions about our families. And crucially, they state that our bodies are not our own: they can be used and exploited to meet wider political aims. In this case, the aim is to rebuild a nation during and after war.

From the far right perspective, which is where my research has focused, abortion bans are a tool to defeat “replacement”. In the West, this replacement is an imagined threat – the belief that migrant people are “replacing” white people, and that replacement is being aided by feminists/liberals who repress the white birth rate via abortion and contraception. Abortion bans exploit women’s reproductive labour, with women becoming the wombs of the nation and delivering babies at “replacement” rates. In Ukraine, of course, the threat of replacement is viscerally more real as a result of invasion and occupation, with Russia trying to say Ukraine has no right to exist. However, the solution to this threat cannot mean removing women’s rights to bodily integrity and following a far right playbook that positions women as reproductive vessels.

Abortion is legal in Ukraine, and available on demand for up to 12 weeks. Women can access abortion pills, and in certain circumstances can terminate a pregnancy after the first trimester. But abortion remains stigmatised, and women’s bodies have been treated as a battleground for US and Russian anti-abortion forces, not least since the start of the full-scale invasion.

Back in 2023, I reported how the anti-abortion US charity Heartbeat International massively increased its spending in Ukraine. The charity funds so-called “crisis pregnancy centres” around the world, and spreads disinformation including that abortion causes cancer, mental illness and infertility, as well as – as I revealed in 2020 – the sensational claim that abortion can “cause” homosexuality in male partners (a claim they removed from their online training following my investigation). Heartbeat provided support to a crisis pregnancy centre in Kharkiv. My investigation found the centre opposed abortion even in cases of rape.

There have been multiple reports since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukrainian women being raped by Russian soldiers, with some leading to pregnancy. At the same time, the Helms Amendment – an anti-abortion feature of US foreign policy – means women’s organisations cannot deliver abortion advice or care when in receipt of US aid. This has had a chilling effect on women’s access to healthcare.

Then there’s Russia. In the occupied territories, Russian abortion laws take precedence: abortion pills are classified alongside morphine, there is no medical abortion, women must undergo anti-abortion counselling before terminating a pregnancy, and babies are valued as future soldiers – with Ukrainian children abducted and indoctrinated to see themselves as Russian. Back home in Russia, propaganda posters feature toddlers in army uniforms placed next to images of a foetus, as he pushes the far right policy that women are the womb of the nation and women’s reproductive labour is crucial to the war effort.

Over the past decade and a half, oligarchs close to Putin such as Konstantin Malofeyev and Vladimir Yakunin have backed and funded anti-abortion causes across Europe, including disseminating anti-abortion disinformation and far right conspiracy via their media channels (Malofeyev’s Tsargrad) and conferences (Yakunin’s Large Families Summit).

Malofeyev is now married to Maria Lvova Belova, the architect of Russia’s child abduction policy. His employee at his St Basil The Great Foundation, Alexey Komov, represented Russian anti-abortion interests in the US and Europe. Up until 2022, he sat on the board of anti-abortion campaign group CitizenGO, which launches global petitions against abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights. Komov’s colleague Pavel Parventiev – the Russian representative at CitizenGO and also involved with WCF – was part of the Agenda Europe network, an online group of anti-abortion politicians, activists, lawyers and think-tanks, where he regularly mixed anti-abortion campaigning with pro-Russia talking points.

Komov was also the Russian representative for Brian Brown’s World Congress of Families, an annual anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ conference. Previous speakers included Viktor Orban and Matteo Salvini. He is perhaps best known in Ukraine for sowing disinformation that in order to join the European Union, countries have to legalise same-sex marriage.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, the planned WCF in Moscow was cancelled and replaced by the Large Families summit. Despite sanctions, many of the same people were present at the summit as had planned to take part in WCF, including invites to UK anti-abortion influencers. Through this summit, its presence and support for initiatives such as WCF and CitizenGO, and its wider anti-abortion spending and organising, Russia has tried to sow division across Europe, using women’s bodies as its metaphorical battleground.

We must stand with our Ukrainian sisters as they fight against any attempts to strip away their rights to bodily autonomy and abortion. The fight for Ukraine is a fight for freedom and democracy – a battle against the far right, fascistic forces embodied by Russia. Democracy and freedom can only happen when women are free and treated as fully human.