The best gift for your spouse or fiancée on International Women’s Day is to make her pregnant, controversial State Duma member Vitaly Milonov, the deputy head of the Russian parliament’s family protection committee, has suggested.
This is the only surprise on March 8 that can make a woman truly happy, Milonov, who himself has six children, including three he adopted, said in an interview with the radio station Govorit Moskva on Thursday.
“I believe that the best gift for a woman is a new pregnancy. A child is a real joy,” he explained. “Men should be men if possible. If not, then flowers are used and things like that.”
The MP, a member of the ruling United Russia Party, warned both men and women against engaging in excessive drinking on the holiday, saying that “a bottle of champagne should be enough.”
Excess drinking at parties could lead to “conception in a drunken state, and this shouldn’t be happening,” he stressed.
“I encourage women to voluntarily give up on booze on March 8 and celebrate it sober, because a sober woman is amazing,” Milonov said.
In January, Mikhail Minenkov, the mayor of Nevinnomyssk in Stavropol Region in the south of Russia made headlines when he encouraged men in the city to “sneak up” on their wives and impregnate them that very evening. For birth rates to increase, “one mustn’t sleep, eat, or drink; instead, one must fall in love,” Minenkov added.
During his address to the Federal Assembly in late February, Russian President Vladimir Putin said “a large family with many children should become the norm [in the country], the philosophy of social life, the guideline of the entire strategy of the state.” According to the president, over the next six years, Russia should achieve a sustainable increase in its birth rate.
Preliminary data published by the state statistics agency Rosstat last month suggested that only 1.264 million babies were born in Russia in 2023, the lowest number since 1999. The figure didn’t include the statistics from either the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk or the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, which were officially incorporated into the Russian state in the fall of 2022 amid the conflict with Ukraine, following referendums held in those four areas.
According to Rosstat’s forecast, birth rates in Russia will only start growing after 2028. By 2046, the population of the country should reach 138 million, the agency said.