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MOSCOW, October 21, 2002 (LSN.ca) – About 60 percent of all pregnancies in Russia end in abortion, according to Vladimir Kulakov, head of Russia’s Scientific Centre for Obstetrics and Gynecology. Only Romania has more abortions per capita.  In addition, about 6 million Russian women are infertile (out of 38 million females who are of child-bearing age), and medical authorities consider abortion to be a “major cause” of infertility, Kulakov said. The number of infertile women is set to increase, as at least one in 10 abortions in Russia is performed on a teenage girl.  News reports are saying that the 1991 abolition of the U.S.S.R. (following the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall) led to “disintegration of the Soviet-era state health care system” – supposedly “a key factor behind Russia’s population decline.”  But this is naive reporting. It well known that Soviet Communism encouraged abortion as a badge of women’s liberation under Marxism-Leninism, and that the health care system was far beneath Western standards well before the collapse of communism. The Soviet Union was the first nation to legalize abortion in 1921.  For newswire coverage see:  https://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021018/ap_wo_en_po/russia_births_1