Comments by "Theodore Shulman" (@ColonelFredPuntridge) on "Demographics Part 6: The Orthodox Predicament" video.

  1. When I was in Leningrad in the 1980s, I met and heard about numerous young women who had had 10 or more abortions. I did some research and found out that much more important than how many abortions a woman has is how old she is when she has them. Fertility wise it’s probably better to have 10 abortions in your late teens and early 20s then to have one or two abortions in your 30s or 40s. So yes, the Soviet women had lots of abortions because the dysfunctional economy made it impossible to get any other kind of birth control, but their abortions mostly didn’t impair their fertility, nearly as much as you might expect from a scary number like 10 abortions in one’s medical history.
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  2. Also, how dangerous and abortion is to future fertility, depends very much on the surgeons, skill or lack of skill. In Leningrad, it seemed that the surgeons, although they were horribly underpaid, were mostly reasonably good at their jobs. Also, now that I think of it, there was one exception to the rule of doctors and surgeons being underpaid, and that was gynecology, I mean sex doctors. They enjoyed very comfortable incomes, because, the government required them to report all cases of venereal disease, and patients used to reward them handsomely for disobeying this requirement – either reward them with money, but more often with special favors, which the patients jobs put them in a position to have access to. So if you were the daughter of a plumber, you might reward your gynecologist for treating your venereal disease without reporting it, by arranging for your father, to go unclog the pipes in his apartment without him having to wait for the government bureaucracy to arrange a home visit from a plumber employed by the government. This was called doing business by barter or in Russian “po_blatu”. It was pretty much the only way the service economy worked. So having a wide circle of friends and friends of friends was much more important than having money.
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  3. One other thing: the safety or non-safety of any abortion anywhere depends very heavily on how early in pregnancy you can get it done. In Leningrad, the women, I knew were mostly university, students and pretty conscientious about taking care of themselves that way although they were not very good in many other ways – they drank like fish, and they chain smoked. One final story if I made about this subject, when I went to Leningrad, I brought with me enough American condoms to last my entire stay, which was one semester just in case I were to fall in love on day one. It turned out. I only used a couple of them, so when it was time to leave, I gave the remainder to one of my Russian language teachers. I thought he would think it was one of my obnoxious jokes – I was quite a practical Joker in those days – and I was quite surprised when he thanked me with tears in his eyes. I told my Russian roommate about this, and he explained that for an almost 4 month supply of American condoms the teacher could probably get enough good cuts of meat and good wine to have a feast every weekend for a year. All, of course, po-blatu.
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