President Vladimir Putin is desperate for Russian women to have more babies.
Though abortion remains legal nationally, Russian authorities have waged war against it, banning "child-free" advocacy, pressuring private clinics to stop performing abortions and subjecting women seeking them to waiting periods and counseling.
Now the Russian president has opened a new front: the search bar. On Monday, Putin ordered the government to develop proposals that will ensure search engines prioritize pregnancy support websites when users search for abortion services.
Unfortunately, resources earmarked for helping women to cultivate new life are being drained by the Kremlin’s focus on taking it across the border. Moscow is throwing more than a third of its next federal budget on defense, while regional healthcare spending falls and social payments face delays. In Putin's Russia, your body is his business, but paying for your baby is up to you.
Building the Motherland
Putin’s obsession with fertility is but a continuation of Russian history.
In 1944, Josef Stalin introduced the Soviet "Mother Heroine" award for women who bore and raised at least 10 children, as the USSR sought to recover from catastrophic wartime losses. Putin resurrected the title in August 2022.
Speaking at the Eastern Economic Forum in September, the Russian president openly declared low fertility one of Russia’s greatest national security threats. That might seem like an overreaction given the number of Ukrainian drones soaring into Russian airspace every night, but his logic is sound.
Russia's exact fertility rate is no longer published by federal statistics service Rosstat, but Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova in August revealed the number was 1.352—far below the 2.1 needed for population replacement. Researchers estimate only 1.19 million babies were born in 2025, a post-Soviet low, and Russian demographers expect the population to shrink from 146 million in early 2025 to about 141 million by 2036, even as the labor ministry says Russia needs 3.1 million additional workers by 2030.
The Kremlin is attacking the problem from both sides.
In 2025, the government launched a national project called "Family," which brought maternity grants, subsidized mortgages and child benefits under one umbrella. Eligible families can receive a payout of around 729,000 rubles ($9,000) toward housing, education and other approved expenses for their first child, and another 234,000 after a second. On paper, it is a serious attempt to help young Russians start and expand families.
At the same time, authorities are working to stigmatize abortion and stretch the limits of the law to obstruct access. Since 2023, at least 25 Russian regions have introduced fines for organizations and individuals found guilty of trying to persuade women to terminate pregnancies, according to Human Rights Watch. Private clinics have been pressured to stop providing abortions, while women seeking them must wait two to seven days and undergo pre-abortion counseling intended to persuade them to reconsider.
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The main motivating factor behind Russia’s abortions is hardly a mystery. A regional government plan to increase the birthrate in Vologda—one of Russia's most aggressive anti-abortion regions—identifies economic hardship as the primary reason behind 59.8 percent of abortion decisions, listing insecure incomes, unemployment, debt and housing difficulties as contributing factors.
Putin's other great national project is making those economic pressures harder to escape.
War Comes First
Russia's draft 2027 budget allocates 17.15 trillion rubles ($213 billion) to defense—a whopping 35.2 percent of all federal expenditure. By contrast, federal healthcare gets just 1.82 trillion ($22.6 billion)—3.7 percent. Funding for the "Family" national project constitutes 5.9 percent of the budget, but this is 10 percent below what the government said it would allocate earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Russia's Accounts Chamber found overall regional healthcare spending fell by 5.8 percent in the first half of the year compared with the same period in 2025. Some parts of Russia are feeling it worse than others—on October 21, legislators in Primorsky Krai cut education spending by 644 million rubles and social support by 207 million. Healthcare programs lost more than a billion rubles, with several hospital and clinic projects postponed until next year.
On Tuesday, the regional labor ministry openly admitted why: wartime demands are straining the regional budget and will result in some social payments being delayed.
All financial obligations to citizens will be met, officials promised—just as soon as the necessary funding becomes available. They were, however, able to divert another 1.5 billion rubles to war-related assistance, and in August raised the one-off signing bonus for new military recruits to 3 million rubles.
Putin insisted in his September speech that Russia's demographic problems were not fundamentally caused by the war, pointing to even lower fertility rates in Japan and South Korea. He is right that the crisis predates his invasion, but pouring enormous resources into a nearly five-year war that a July Center for Strategic and International Studies report said has killed or wounded 1.4 million Russian men certainly hasn’t helped.
If the Kremlin really wants Russian women to have more children, perhaps it should stop trying to control their search results, actually deliver the payments they are promised, and stop sending their men off to die.
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here.