Soviets Seek to Boost Birthrate and Infant Care

The Soviet Union, beset with a dropping birthrate and infant mortality of Third World proportions in some locales, Tuesday adopted a sweeping emergency program championed by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to aid couples who have babies and improve infant health care.

The official Tass news agency said 6 million families would get more money from the government as a result.

A leading demographic expert on the Soviet Union said the resolution adopted by the Supreme Soviet, as the national legislature is called, was clearly intended to reverse a recent decline in the birthrate in the country’s Slavic heartland--Russia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia.

“This is a major pro-natalist move because the fertility rate in the Slavic republics has started to decline again,” Murray Feshbach, research professor of demography at Georgetown University in Washington, said. “And if they want those children to survive, they’ve also got to improve the health care for infants.”

Russians already barely make up the majority in this country of more than 100 ethnic groups and are certain to see their share in the population diminish further if much higher birthrates in the traditionally Muslim areas of Soviet Central Asia persist. That trend is clearly worrisome for the Kremlin leadership, which, despite the country’s changing ethnic balance, is still firmly in the hands of Slavs.

The urgency of the pro-birth program, which is forecast to cost the equivalent of $5.3 billion yearly, was stressed by Gorbachev last week, who used his new prerogatives as Soviet president to request that lawmakers consider it as soon as possible.

As another indication of the plan’s importance, finding revenues for it in the state budget will mean postponing raises for employees in universities and other institutions of higher learning, as well as for Soviet citizens who work in the harsh conditions of the Far North and other remote areas.

Child-care subsidies paid by the state until the age of 18 months will increase from a maximum of 50 rubles to 70 rubles, or $83 to $116. Mothers who do not work will be eligible for the allowance for the first time, and if a woman gives birth to twins or triplets, she will receive a stipend for each child, instead of only for one, as was the previous practice.

Women who have children age 14 and younger may now also work only a partial workday or workweek at their request. That provision continues a trend away from the unisex treatment that the Bolshevik revolutionaries originally advocated for the men and women of the proletariat, and toward a special status for mothers.

Soviet sociologist Tatyana Zaslavsakaya has even said that her country must officially recognize that a woman’s primary role in society is childbearing and rearing and that the often menial and brutal jobs given Soviet women are not a sign of their equality with men, but of inferiority.

Labor laws now allow Soviet women to carry up to 7 tons by hand during a single work shift, while Japanese women are limited to 1,540 pounds. More Soviet women work on the night shift than men and traditionally fill such drudge jobs as street cleaners and janitors.

Only 12% of managerial personnel are women.

While Western women “are still striving for the right to work in coal mines, firefighting units, police brigades . . . Soviet women are battling to be freed from such labor,” American author Francine du Plessix Gray wrote in a recently published book, “Soviet Women.”

There is no sign they are succeeding.

“Our state murders the family and women,” a 36-year-old working mother of two from Vladivostok wrote in despair to a magazine last year. “Can I be called a woman after working, (lugging) packages, (standing in) lines, cooking, tub washing?”

She said she felt like “a lemon that is squeezed dry, and then tossed away on pension.”

The emergency plan specifically allocates the equivalent of more than $660 million in precious hard currency reserves, presumably for foreign-made health-care technology and imported consumer goods needed in early child care, such as baby bottles and disposable syringes, which are often impossible to find in this shortage-plagued economy.

Health care in the Soviet Union has long been free--one of the proudest achievements of socialism--but its standards are often shoddy and the results alarming. According to one recent publication, in one unidentified Central Asian republic, babies get an average of 200 to 400 shots in their first year of life--a figure Georgetown University’s Feshbach called “mind-boggling.”

“It means they’re just giving them everything in the medicine chest,” the American demographer said in a telephone interview. “It’s the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard.”

For an uncomplicated respiratory illness like bronchitis, a Soviet infant receives the staggering number of 38 shots, the publication reported.

State-run television has revealed that more than three times as many women die in childbirth in the Soviet Union as in the United States. Gray, recounting her visit to a Soviet obstetrics clinic, said that a midwife walked “between the three stoical, moaning women, screaming at them to push harder.”

Whether such practices can be changed by an infusion of state money is far from certain.

However, recent official statistics report that infant mortality has decreased to 22.2 deaths per 1,000 live births, which Soviet officials estimate is the lowest in their country’s history. But in some republics, infant mortality runs as high as 50 per 1,000 live births, a level that China, a country far poorer than the Soviet Union, attained nationwide by 1985.

Also, Feshbach said there is persuasive evidence of growing under-reporting of infant deaths to make the performance of local health systems look better. The demographer came to the Soviet Union last year to observe how the national census, carried out once every 10 years, is conducted.

That census showed that the share of ethnic Russians in the Soviet population had declined to 50.8%, down from 52.4% in 1979. The birthrate dropped to 17.6 per 1,000 people, down from 18.8 the previous year and from 20.0 in 1986, the peak in postwar Soviet history.

However, the national average masks a lower birthrate among Slavs. In 1988, the most recent year for which detailed statistics are available, 16 babies were born per 1,000 people in the Russian Federation and Byelorussia, and 14.5 in the Ukraine.