A daily source of drivel on all matters related to global health, the Global Health Now (GHN) newsletter of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (words that ought to strike fear into the heart of even the most stoical) toed the line on the Covid narrative, is vaccine obsessed and also scathing of anything remotely pro-life regarding unborn children.
Monday’s (3rd February 2025) edition of GHN reported on Russia’s “Year of the Family” as follows:
A Window Into Russia’s ‘Year of the Family’ Restrictions
Staring down a decades-long demographic crisis—exacerbated by losses in the Ukraine war—Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is pushing “pro-family” policies.
- Doctors and employers who advise women to get abortions face fines; couples seeking divorce must undergo psychological consultations and a waiting period; and a new law punishes “childfree propaganda” with heavy fines.
- New “family studies” classes in schools emphasize family as the state’s foundation.
The piece was linked to a report from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
Essentially, they are saying that trying to protect unborn children and to preserve marriage are bad things. Clearly, they mock the idea of “family studies” and deny what most people of goodwill would acknowledge, that the family is indeed the foundation, if not of the state (still an important idea in Russia) but of society. More specifically, it is the foundation of a stable society.
Why should doctors and others who advise women to get abortions not face fines? In fact, why should they not face harsher punishment, say, a prison sentence? If we acknowledge that life begins at conception – hardly a controversial issue, even for many who are pro-abortion – and that abortion involves killing a person then why should those who advocate abortion to specific women not be charged with being accessories to murder? After all, instead of advising women to have an abortion, if they were advising them to go and murder their husbands and giving them the wherewithal to accomplish that, then the nature of their accessory actions would not be questioned.
According to Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, the Russian government has had the audacity, in November 2024, to promote the showing in cinemas of “a film promoting antiabortion messages produced by a channel associated with the Russian Orthodox Church began screening in cinemas. Special screenings were arranged for schoolchildren, university students, and government employees.” Of course, the pro-abortion lobby are worried that all this “might some day culminate in a de facto ban on abortions.” We can only hope.
The promotion of “childfree propaganda” is also to be met with fines. Childfree-ness is of course promoted by the green lobby and the net zero obsessed on the grounds that humans are responsible for climate change and that restricting our numbers is the only way to prevent it. That powerful message is clearly getting through as birthrates tumble in developed countries, with disastrous results for economy and society.
The message that “we are the carbon they need to reduce” has penetrated the minds of the educated middle classes to such an extent that it has been described as a ‘war on motherhood’. The Russian government are right to counter this message.
Divorce will become more difficult in Russia, something portrayed as a bad thing by GNH and Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. The Russian government are not suggesting a ban on divorce, merely that people ought to seek help, psychological if necessary to see if their marriages can be saved. While divorce is entirely necessary under some circumstances – even the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges that – the effect of easy and quick divorce in the UK has been nothing short of disastrous.
Divorce, traditionally the preserve of the monied classes, became easier for working class people which, while it may have been more affordable, left children without fathers, mothers without incomes and all the sequelae of broken families. Families are not only the foundation of society, but they are also the fabric of society. Without that fabric, we witness rising crime rates, rising misuse of drugs and alcohol and lowered educational achievement. Our response has been the ‘great replacement’ of our population with further disastrous results for communities in many UK cities.
But organs such as GHN and Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty mock measures to address the issues of declining population, social breakdown and the adverse effects of mass immigration. Vladimir Putin, very much behind the pro-life, pro-family measures, is an easy target. An international pariah since the invasion of Ukraine and a man who is, undoubtedly, no saint when it comes to dealing with dissent, the measures he is introducing can be pointed to as a warning of what can happen when dictators are in power.
Meantime, here in the UK we should serve as a warning of what happens in democracies when the population goes to sleep and the cultural Marxists – describing themselves variously as Conservative or Labour – are in power. Russia increasingly looks like the kind of place where the religious and family-oriented can flourish.
Roger Watson is a retired academic nurse who lives in the UK.
He is currently engaged in a range of professional consultancies in the UK, Europe and China. He writes regularly for several outlets including The Daily Sceptic, The European Conservative, Country Squire Magazine and The New Conservative.
