Russian lawmakers on Tuesday voted to ban the advocacy of child-free lifestyles, in a move that is part of a broader effort by the Kremlin to reverse a falling birthrate and promote the country as a bastion of traditional values that is battling a decadent West.
The State Duma, or lower house of Parliament, unanimously approved a bill that would ban any form of “propaganda” promoting the “refusal to have children.” That would include material on the internet, in media outlets, in movies and in advertising that portrays child-free lifestyles as attractive.
Violators would be subjected to fines of up to about $4,000 for individuals and $50,000 for legal entities.
The bill has been broadly endorsed by the Kremlin and is expected to receive approval from the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Parliament, and then be signed into law by President Vladimir V. Putin.
In September, speaking about the proposed legislation, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, called demography “one of the main challenges” for Russia.
“Everything that needs to be done to increase birthrates must be done,” Mr. Peskov said. “And everything that obstructs that must disappear from our lives.”
Separately, Russian lawmakers on Tuesday also passed a bill that would ban adoption of Russian children by citizens of countries where gender transition is legal.
Russian officials have been increasingly conflating demographic issues with their ideological conflict with the West. They have portrayed Russia as a bulwark of traditional Christian values that is opposed to immoral Western states.
Speaking about the bills on Tuesday, Vyacheslav Volodin, the head of the Duma, said that “the West’s policy toward children has been ruinous.”
“We must do everything so that new generations of our citizens grow up oriented toward traditional family values,” Mr. Volodin wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
Over the past years, Russia has been suffering from a continuous demographic decline as a much smaller generation of women — born amid the chaos and poverty that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union — has entered childbearing age. Not counting Crimea, which it annexed a decade ago, Russia’s population is about 145 million, somewhat smaller than it was in 1991, when the U.S.S.R. broke up.
The number of deaths has exceeded the number of births in Russia since 2016. However, Russia was able to keep its overall population steady because of migrants, most of them from countries of Central Asia, coming to Russia to work. But those numbers have been shrinking because of declining wages and hardening attitudes toward migrant workers in Russian society.
The decline has been further exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, where Russia has lost up to 150,000 soldiers killed so far, according to estimates by Western governments and Russian researchers.
The situation in Russia also reflects the broader demographic trends in Europe and beyond. For instance, Russian fertility rates per woman have been higher than in many developed countries, including Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Japan and South Korea.
Alexey Raksha, an independent demographer, estimated that Russia’s overall population would shrink by 500,000 this year. Russia is also likely to experience a decline in average life expectancy, according to Mr. Raksha.
But Mr. Raskha said that the ban on propagating child-free lifestyles won’t have any effect on Russia’s birthrate.
“This is a political thing that has very little to do with demography,” said Mr. Raksha in September when the bill was introduced.
In 2022, only 2.4 percent of Russian women and 3.5 percent of Russian men said they did not want to have children, according to a survey conducted by the Russian state statistics service.
According to Ilya Grashchenkov, an analyst of Russian politics based in Moscow, by banning child-free lifestyles Russian authorities want to “demonstrate their understanding of traditional values.”
“Since it is impossible to describe them comprehensively,” he said, “they do it by contrasting them with the Western ones.”
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