Moscow, September 13, 2017
Photo: uoj.org.ua Pro-life opponents of abortion will hold the “They Could Have Gone to School” event on September 14 to mark the start of the academic new year. The event will be held in 34 cities throughout Russia, including Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Kazan, Russia, Krasnoyarsk, Tyumen, Krasnodar, Kirov, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Omsk, and Orenburg, reports RIA-Novosti.
“Members of the all-Russian movement For Life! will try to draw public attention to the fact that Russia loses the equivalent of two major schools’ worth of students every day in the country’s abortion clinics,” the movement’s press service reported.
“During the event, activists will display children’s shoes on city squares, symbolizing the daily number of abortions in individual regions and localities. Organizers plan to put out 2,000 pairs of children’s shoes in the capital on the square in Sokolniki Park, which corresponds to the daily number of abortions in the country. Volunteers are currently collecting shoes from Muscovites and residents of the Moscow region,” For Life! reports.
According to the organizers, the shoes are designed to “visualize the dry statistics of abortion.” The shoes will then be given to poor families.
Over the course of two and a half years, another program, “Save a Life,” which works with more than 140 psychologists and social workers in 86 cities throughout Russia, has managed to prevent 7,000 abortions by women with financial problems. 65,000 in all have received help from the program’s various facets. Activists believe that the state and society have enough resources to help such families keep their babies.
In August of this year, For Life! announced the collection of more than 1 million signatures in support of the initiative to allocate assistance from the state budget to families with many children. The signature list also has a proposal on the protection of every child's life from the moment of conception.
The number of abortions in Russia has been cut in half over the past four years, Minister of Health Veronika Skvortsova recently stated.
Skvortsova noted that 2016 was a “very significant” year, the number of abortions reducing by 96,300 (13%). In previous years the average drop was 8%, for example, by 67,000 in 2015. “I’m very pleased,” she said, “that of these ninety-odd thousand, the number of abortions by desire, that is, without any medical condition, decreased by 72,000.”
