June 03, 2025

Pills and Poisons


Pills and Poisons
Shadow of a pregnant girl standing in front of a window. The Russian Life files.

President Vladimir Putin has praised the autonomous Tuva Republic, one of the poorest regions in Russia, for its high birth rates. Yet Tuva leads the Russian Federation in teen pregnancies and abortion rates. Girls and women buy mifepristone and misoprostol from online groups to circumvent the region's restrictive abortion laws — even at the cost of their lives. 

The only hospital allowed to provide abortions in Tuva is the Kyzyl Perinatal Center. Milana, a Kyzyl OB-GYN, whose name was changed to protect her, said, "Every department of gynecology is hell." The medic described how she sees "ten or more girls per day" who need to get their uteri scraped. Milana believes that counterfeit abortion pills purchased online are causing pregnant women to flock to the hospital doors with complications. The physician said, "When we call the police, they cry, they tell us about their difficult life, that their husband doesn't work and they have many children."

In recent years, multiple Russian regions have restricted pregnancy terminations in private clinics. Since August 2023, 19 regions banned "inducement to abortion." In Tatarstan, Karelia, and Chelyabinsk, officials pressured private practices to stop providing terminations. Since September 2024, mifepristone and misoprostol are listed as "drugs subject to quantitative accounting." Therefore, they are treated the same as narcotics and psychedelics, making it difficult to access emergency contraception that contains them in small doses. 

Journalists from the independent outlet Veter found women's online forums in which users asked for help with unwanted pregnancies. The group included posts promoting foreign abortion pills. One post read, "Girls, I want an answer to the question: Is there any harm in taking Chinese abortion pills?" Journalists contacted the pill sellers in the group. The price of miferoprostone was R5,000 ($65). Anonymous accounts also offered vacuum abortions in private clinics for R15000 ($194).

Gynecologists recommend that patients not take abortive pills without consulting a physician first. Incorrect dosages, poorly timed ingestion, and lack of informed supervisions of complications have had fatal consequences. In 2019, the body of a woman and her 24 week-old fetus were found in Tuva surrounded by bloodied menstrual hygiene products and packages of foreign-made misoprostol. 

Veter spoke to Sayana, another Tuvan woman whose name was changed for her protection. She decided to buy pills online because she did not want to do the tests and psychological exams required prior to a pregnancy termination in Russia. She did not consult a physician and was instead guided by a drug smuggler on how to take the medication. After taking the drug, Sayana experienced toxicosis. Her seller insisted she should not vomit, or the pills would be less effective. Sayana survived, but experienced complications in childbirth a year and a half later and had to resort to vacuum aspiration.

The founder of the Emergency Contraception Fund, Irina Fainman, said Tuva's mountainous geography and distance to other regions make it harder for women to access emergency contraception than in other parts of Russia. It is also easy for smugglers to bring pills from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and China, which are right along Tuva's border.

OB-GYN Diana Lobzeva stressed that sex education is necessary to prevent pregnancies. However, authorities have not announced any plans to combat the clandestine abortion crisis.

You Might Also Like

Orthodox Church Rising
  • January 14, 2025

Orthodox Church Rising

The power of the ROC is growing in the government, according to independent publication Verstka.
The Patriarch's Abortion Prevention
  • October 22, 2024

The Patriarch's Abortion Prevention

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill will send letters to pregnant women in 16 regions to dissuade them from receiving abortion care.
Children with Child
  • April 02, 2024

Children with Child

From pressuring teens to abort to denying requested abortions, orphanages in Russia often mishandle pregnancy cases. 
Progress and Regression
  • March 20, 2024

Progress and Regression

How have Russian women's lives changed in the two years since the beginning of Russia's War on Ukraine?
Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of Our Books

The Samovar Murders

The Samovar Murders

The murder of a poet is always more than a murder. When a famous writer is brutally stabbed on the campus of Moscow’s Lumumba University, the son of a recently deposed African president confesses, and the case assumes political implications that no one wants any part of.
Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

In this comprehensive, quixotic and addictive book, Edwin Trommelen explores all facets of the Russian obsession with vodka. Peering chiefly through the lenses of history and literature, Trommelen offers up an appropriately complex, rich and bittersweet portrait, based on great respect for Russian culture.
93 Untranslatable Russian Words

93 Untranslatable Russian Words

Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.
How Russia Got That Way

How Russia Got That Way

A fast-paced crash course in Russian history, from Norsemen to Navalny, that explores the ways the Kremlin uses history to achieve its ends.
Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

This is the work that made Chekhov, launching his career as a writer and playwright of national and international renown. Retranslated and updated, this new bilingual edition is a super way to improve your Russian.
Survival Russian

Survival Russian

Survival Russian is an intensely practical guide to conversational, colloquial and culture-rich Russian. It uses humor, current events and thematically-driven essays to deepen readers’ understanding of Russian language and culture. This enlarged Second Edition of Survival Russian includes over 90 essays and illuminates over 2000 invaluable Russian phrases and words.
Tolstoy Bilingual

Tolstoy Bilingual

This compact, yet surprisingly broad look at the life and work of Tolstoy spans from one of his earliest stories to one of his last, looking at works that made him famous and others that made him notorious. 
Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Dostoyevsky Bilingual

Bilingual series of short, lesser known, but highly significant works that show the traditional view of Dostoyevsky as a dour, intense, philosophical writer to be unnecessarily one-sided. 
Driving Down Russia's Spine

Driving Down Russia's Spine

The story of the epic Spine of Russia trip, intertwining fascinating subject profiles with digressions into historical and cultural themes relevant to understanding modern Russia. 
Fish: A History of One Migration

Fish: A History of One Migration

This mesmerizing novel from one of Russia’s most important modern authors traces the life journey of a selfless Russian everywoman. In the wake of the Soviet breakup, inexorable forces drag Vera across the breadth of the Russian empire. Facing a relentless onslaught of human and social trials, she swims against the current of life, countering adversity and pain with compassion and hope, in many ways personifying Mother Russia’s torment and resilience amid the Soviet disintegration.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
73 Main Street, Suite 402
Montpelier VT 05602

802-223-4955