Agence France Presse English Thu 05 Oct
2000 12:05 GMT (08:05 Eastern
Time) International News
MOSCOW, Oct 5 (AFP) - With only one pregnancy in three carried to term,
Russia's birth rate has fallen to critical levels, the head of the
statistics
department of the Russian Academy of Sciences said Thursday.
Women of childbearing age are having an average of 1.3 child each, lower
than the normal level of 2.3 and closer to the critical floor of 1.1,
said Olga
Frolova.
"We are facing a serious decrease of the population rate,"
said Frolova, who
noted that abortion still remained the main contraceptive for Russian
women, nine years after the collapse of the Soviet regime.
There are more than two million abortions performed every year in
Russia,
said Vladimir Kulakov, the director of the obstetrics and gynecology
center
at the Academy of Medical Sciences.
The Russian population is expected to drop by 700,000 in 2001 and will
total 144.5 million, according to the state statistics committee quoted
by
Interfax.
Over the past eight years, Russia's population has decreased by close to
two percent with 2.8 million fewer people, according to official
figures.
Deaths far outpace births by a ratio of 14.7 in 1,000 compared to 8.4.
Only 1.2 million children are born each year in Russia, well below the
two
million needed to keep the population at existing levels, said Kulakov.
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