3rd January 2002
The week before Christmas is not an ideal time to be going to a meeting in Moscow, but there I was, December 15th at 5.30 a.m., out at Dublin Airport queuing for the flight to Copenhagen.
It was a long line of mostly young people, all with several enormous suitcases or boxes. After a while I realised none of them were speaking English or any language I could recognise. I asked the young woman beside me where she was going. "Warsaw," she said. "And her companion? " I asked. "Tallinn," was the reply.
Suddenly I realised I was in the company of many of our guest workers going home to Poland and the Baltic States for Christmas, with all those cases and boxes full of presents for the folks back home. People travelling back home having had to leave to get work abroad the way Irish people did less than a generation ago. At Copenhagen we went our various ways, a young Russian boy from Siberia who was at school at Gormanstown College coming along with me for the Moscow plane.
The Inter-European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development was held in the Duma and the forty to fifty of us attending were accommodated next door in the luxurious, but not very full, National Hotel. I had been well briefed by the Irish Family Planning Association on the two topics for the few days - HIV and Aids and Trafficking in Women and Children, really jolly pre-Christmas subjects. Most, but not all, of the delegates were from parliaments in Europe.
I had met the women who started the Russian Planned Parenthood Federation at the UN Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994. They were profoundly depressed at that time. Abortion was the only method women had to control the size of their families and some ended up having twenty or more abortions in the course of their lifetimes. I will always remember one of them saying to me about Russian condoms (few were available), "The condoms, they melt". On my return to Ireland when I told this to someone he was surprised because he thought it was very cold in Russia, this says a lot for his knowledge of the use of condoms.
Well, those founders of the Russian Planned Parenthood Federation have made great progress and the abortion rate in Russia has dropped 45% in 10 years they told me. Naturally all those present congratulated the Russians but a surprise was in store for me when Deputy Nikolai Gerasimenko replied to the congratulations. He agreed that good progress had been made but in the course of his reply he said women from other countries, even Ireland, were coming to Moscow for abortions. Not being a Russian speaker I was listening to the interpretation and could scarcely believe my ears. If I had not seen Nick Rea, a doctor who sits in the House of Lords and the U.K. representative, raise his eyebrows at the information I would have felt sure I had misheard.
After the session I went up to Nikolai Gerasimenko and, through one of the excellent interpreters, asked him if he had said women came from Ireland for abortions. So he was told by the Department of Health, he said, but the Deputy Minister for Health would be there in the afternoon and I could ask her.
Olga Sharpova, a young paediatrician, is Deputy Minister for Health. She told me some Irish women did come to Moscow on tourist visas for abortions. Not a large number, she said, but not a handful either. I asked about cost. Fifty dollars in a private hospital and that included the anaesthetic.
Remembering that abortions in England now cost three to four hundred pounds sterling, that the airfare might not be that much different (a woman seeking an abortion is not in a position to book cheap flights months in advance) and accommodation in Moscow being so much cheaper than in England, it is probably much less expensive to go to Moscow and much more likely one's anonymity will be preserved. A tourist visa is 20 to 50 punt, now 25 to 64 Euro.
Will anyone in Ireland mind that Irish women are flying from the farthest part of the west of Europe to the farthest east for abortions? I think not. Once they keep out of sight we can keep them out of mind. Their journeys must be so different to those young people who accompanied me on the outward trip to Copenhagen full of Christmas joy.
Senator Mary Henry, MD
