Russian lawmakers on September 25 approved the first reading of legislation that would ban the adoption of Russian children by citizens from countries where gender transition is legal in a nod to the Kremlin's crusade to protect what it views as "traditional family values."
The bill is moving through the State Duma -- led by the legislature's chairman, Vyacheslav Volodin -- along with two other pieces of legislation that would ban "propagating child-free ideology" and impose large fines for "propagating childlessness."
If approved in two subsequent readings and by the Federation Council, the ban would hit prospective parents from countries such as Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland, all of which allow for gender transitioning.
Last year, Russia adopted a law banning surgical operations "aimed at changing the sex of a person" and the changing of gender in documents. Separately, the Supreme Court decided in November to ban the nonexistent "International Public LGBT Movement."
Over the past decade, Russian President Vladimir Putin, with support from the dominant Russian Orthodox Church, has portrayed himself as a champion of what he describes as traditional values, a theme that plays well among many of his supporters in Russia.
In November 2022, less than nine months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was launched, Putin signed a decree supporting a 2021 document on Russia's "traditional spiritual-moral values," including "service to the fatherland," "strong families," and "the priority of the spiritual over the material."
Among his initiatives, in July 2023 he signed into law a ban on gender-reassignment surgery and hormone therapy done as part of the gender-transition process.
Other bills that year aimed against "Western anti-family ideology" annulled marriages where one of the parties had "changed gender," while also banning transgender people from adopting.
Russia had already banned adoptions from the United States in 2012 in retaliation to a U.S. law imposing asset freezes and visa bans on Russians accused by Washington of human rights abuses, including those believed involved in the death of a whistleblowing Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in a Moscow jail in 2009.
Russian authorities also have raised the issue of "traditional family values" to stressing the need to increase the birth rate in the country amid an ongoing decrease of the country's population.
Earlier on September 25, lawmakers in the Far Eastern region of Primorye adopted in all three readings a bill banning the "inducement to abortions."
Similar laws have been adopted since 2023 in several other Russian regions, including Mordovia, Tver and Kaliningrad.
Russian rights activists have expressed concern over moves to restrict access to abortions.