You're reading: In Kirovohrad, soul-searching about why so many abort

KIROVOHRAD – A dozen women wait in line in the corridor of the Kirovohrad regional consultancy for pregnancy.

Many of them are deciding whether to keep their babies. Two out of 100 will choose to abort. This central Ukrainian city has the highest abortion rate in Ukraine, where the average number of abortions is 13.9 per 1,000 pregnancies, according to the Health Ministry – or six times the rate in Western Europe.

Olena Makaruk, head of the family planning department of the center, is sitting in her modest, Soviet-style office in the hospital, where she has just finished trying to persuade an unmarried 22-year-old woman not to have an abortion. “So many tears,” she says. “Three doctors barely managed to persuade her to keep the child.”

Basically, they scared the young woman by telling her that aborting her first pregnancy can cause severe health consequences.

About 70-80 percent of women’s infertility is traced back to surgical abortions, and there are still rare cases in Ukraine when women die during the procedure, doctors say. There were 800,000 infertile couples in Ukraine, according to 2010 data, the latest available.

But despite the risks, many women still opt for abortions. Some of them have little knowledge about contraception options or limited access to it. Others simply choose to ignore the options.

“There are women, who don’t even want to hear about contraception and choose abortion,” said Olga Hryshchenko, professor of the Kharkiv Medical Academy.

In economically depressed regions like Kirovohrad, it is common for women not to use contraceptives.
Experts in rural areas say that oral contraceptives are hard to come by.  And with an average price of Hr 60 per package of contraceptive pills, some women decide it’s much cheaper to have an abortion, which is supposedly free of charge in public hospitals. In private clinics, abortions start at Hr 1,000.

Apart from being economically depressed, religion does not have a strong influence in Kirovohrad Oblast. Abortions tend to be fewer in areas where churches are strong since many Christians and others consider abortion to be murder. A case in point is western Ukraine, were abortion rates are lower than the national average.

In Kirovohrad, by contrast, “women here don’t have fear that they are killing a human inside them,” said Makaruk of the family planning department.

Because abortions are cheap and easily available, Ukraine has become a popular destination for Polish women who seek them. Because of the strong Roman Catholic influence in Poland, abortions were banned in 2011, but exceptions were made for medical reasons.

Poor education is also a contributing factor when it comes to high abortion rates. Anna Storchak, trainer of the Healthy Women of Ukraine program, funded jointly by United Nations Population Fund and the U.S. Agency for International Development, says too many Ukrainian women believe that oral contraceptives are harmful, for example, a myth inherited from the Soviet Union.

That fear was valid in the 1960s–70s, when the pill only just became available. “These days, one pack of contraceptives contains the same amount of hormones that one pill used to have,” says Storchak.

International donors working in Ukraine say education is the key to fighting high abortion rates. “The high rate of abortions could be decreased with proper information campaign,” says Kateryna Pryshchepa, communication associate of United Nations Population Fund in Ukraine.

Her organization started a program for training gynecologists in oblasts like Kirovohrad, teaching them modern methods of contraception so that they can suggest them to their patients.

Overall, however, the news is good, with fewer women nationally having abortions each yer.

In the first years after independence in 1991, Ukraine had about one million abortions per year, while in 2011 there were only 180,000 registered cases of medically interrupted pregnancies.

Meanwhile, experts say the real figures are much higher than the official data as private clinics don’t report all abortions. Also, use of the abortion pill at the early stages of impregnation also tends to go unreported.

Doctors say that the younger generation of Ukrainian women is more aware of modern contraception than their mothers. Makaruk says there are almost no young women who say in her office that they “don’t remember how many abortions they had in their lives,” a phrase she used to hear a lot from the older generation.

Kyiv Post staff writer  Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]