******************OFF TOPIC (ABORTION)*******************
Dan, the situation in Russia is quite different from what you think it is.
Russians have neverbeen puritanical -- quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. (Trust me, I've spent a lot of time there, and I was married to a Russian.)
True, under the Soviet regime, pornography was banned, but pornography is not the same thing as sex. Some might even argue that it is the opposite of sex.
The true tragedy of women in the Soviet Union in the past, as in Russia today, is that birth control devices were not easily obtainable. More precisely, birth control devices for women (pills, the loop, etc.) were not. Condoms weren't either, but most men would not use them anyway, since to this day they generally assume that birth control (like just about everything else) is the woman's responsibility.
At the same time, because of very cramped living quarters, most families in the Soviet Union limited the number of children to one, or at most, two.
So what happened? Abortions were used as the primary means of birth control. Many women have had ten, fifteen, twenty abortions...
It is truly an awful situation. One of my oldest friends headed Planned Parenthood's Far East office for a long time. A few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, he started visiting Russia, as part of an effort to educate the Russians about more humane methods of birth control, and specifically to figure out ways to get men to use condoms, and to distribute, and encourage the manufacture of, condoms that would at least work.
Ironic, isn't it: that wicked Planned Parenthood was trying to get the Russians to cut back on abortions, and was promoting the use of birth control as the alternative..Cut off their funding, by God!
jbe |
