The Russian Orthodox Church has described in a statement released on Wednesday the deliberate termination of pregnancy as equal to “murder“.
The Orthodox Church in eastern Europe is the equivalent of the Catholic Church in the West.
The orthodox church’s governing body known as the Holy Synod said in its statement after careful deliberation that “The church unequivocally equates arbitrary surgical or medical abortion to murder, regardless of the method or the length of pregnancy.”
“For that reason”, it said, “it is unacceptable to proclaim ‘a right to abortion’, which means ‘a right to murder’.”
“There is no right to abortion”, it affirmed.
Church leaders, activists and politicians have been debating these issues in Russia with many demanding restrictions on abortion or its total ban.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin has resisted the growing demand for full ban, although at the end-of-year press conference on 14 December, he tacitly called on doctors to be “very careful” about conducting the procedure.
The Synod went a step further in rejecting the argument of pro-choice movements that terminating a pregnancy should be allowed up until the embryo reaches a certain stage of development.
The Synod concluded, “Propaganda of abortion in any form, including in the media, is unacceptable”.
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, Head of the Russian Orthodox Church last month called abortion a “national disaster” that destroys “the future of our society.”
In the meantime, President Putin has consistently asked Russians to have more children and halt the population decline in the Russian federation. In November, he signed a decree proclaiming 2024 the Year of the Family – a program which seeks to promote return to “traditional family values” among Russians.
The position of the Russian Holy Synod seems to reflect a growing realization of the scourge of abortion within the human family.
In the United States in June last year, the Supreme Court opened the door for individual states to ban or severely restrict the ability for pregnant women to get abortions when it overturned it’s own Roe v Wade judgement.
In 1973, the court had ruled in Roe v Wade that pregnant women were entitled to an abortion during the first three months of their pregnancy, while allowing for legal restrictions and bans in the second and third trimester.
The Supreme Court’s turn around does not mean that abortion have now become illegal in all the US but it paves the way for individual states to legislate on this vexed and contentious moral issue.
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