Woman fined $500 for promoting ‘child-free lifestyle’
A 29-year-old woman in Sevastopol has been fined 50,000 rubles (about US$500) for promoting a child-free lifestyle on social media, according to a statement by local police on Friday. It is the first penalty imposed under Russia’s recent ban on ‘propaganda of childlessness’.
According to the authorities, the woman shared “misanthropic posts” on social media, including statements “favoring a carefree life over childbearing.” Despite recent legal changes, she did not remove these posts, prompting a fine under the Russian Code of Administrative Offenses, the police said.
In November 2024, Russian lawmakers passed legislation banning the promotion of voluntary childlessness, aiming to boost the country’s declining birth rate. The law prohibits disseminating information that encourages people not to have children, with fines reaching 400,000 rubles for individuals and up to five million rubles for organizations.
The measure follows the government’s stated intent to promote traditional family values. Russian President Vladimir Putin has emphasized the importance of increasing the birth rate. “If we want to preserve ourselves as an ethnic group – or as ethnic groups inhabiting Russia – there should be at least two children. To expand and develop, we need at least three children,” he said last year.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has labeled the low birth rates in Russia a “catastrophe,” and Nina Ostanina, an MP for the Communist Party, suggested a “special demographic operation” to address the issue.
According to preliminary data from Rosstat, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, as of January 1, 2025, the country’s population stood at 146,028,325, reflecting a 0.08% decrease over the past year. These figures exclude data from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, Zaporozhye, and Kherson regions, the formerly Ukrainian regions that joined Russia in the fall of 2022, the agency said.
