Global Roundup: Russia Bans "Child-free Propaganda," African Women's Counter Climate Summit, 1st U.S. Trans Lawmaker, Indigenous Activist vs Racist, Sexual Violence in Argentina, Zimbabwe Hut Painting

Blogger and marketer Alina Rzhanova, 33, adjusts clothes of her eight-month-old son Igor in their apartment in the city of Yaroslavl, Russia October 3, 2024. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina© Thomson Reuters

Russia's lower house of parliament voted unanimously on Tuesday to ban what authorities cast as pernicious propaganda for a child-free way of life, hoping to boost a faltering birth rate.

Official data released in September put the birth rate at its lowest in a quarter of a century. The Kremlin called the figures "catastrophic for the future of the nation".

President Vladimir Putin, who has cast Russia as a bastion of "traditional values" locked in an existential struggle with a decadent West, has encouraged women to have at least three children, saying that will help secure the future of Russians. There are already financial and other incentives.

The law, expected to be swiftly approved by the upper house of parliament and Putin, joins other restrictions on free expression including a ban on content deemed to promote "non-traditional lifestyles" such as same-sex relationships or gender fluidity, as well as on dissenting accounts of the conflict in Ukraine.

Authors of "child-free propaganda" will be subject to fines of up to 400,000 roubles ($4,100) for individuals, twice that amount for officials, and up to 5 million roubles ($51,000) for legal entities.

Russian women pushed back against the thinking that propaganda caused the birth rate decline.

People want children, but there's no money. That's why people are not having children. Not because someone somewhere wrote something. -Alina Rzhanova

Yana, a 40-year-old woman who said she did not want children and declined to give her surname because of the subject's sensitivity, said she too felt that ensuring decent living standards, particularly beyond the big cities, could help reverse the declining birth rate.

A child-free community is where people on the same wavelength discuss why they don't want children. Do they have the right to discuss it? They do. People have children when they are confident in tomorrow. But when mortgage rates reach 20% a year, I don't think it's a good time to have unlimited children. -Yana