Having children is the same duty of a citizen to society as serving in the army and paying taxes. This is the opinion of activists of the anti-abortion movement “For Life”, who gathered last week for their annual festival. And if so, then abortion can well be regarded as a crime against the state, and its ban is logical and desirable. "Lenta.ru" attended the event, found out what worries the "Orthodox Grandmothers" and what solutions are offered in the organization "Many Children is Good." I also talked with the president of the festival, Sergei Chesnokov.
In the building of the Salut Hotel, everything seemed to be as usual - groups of Chinese tourists were milling around the hall, the receptionist was bored, the porters were waiting for work. But something distinguished this day from the rest - for example, two handsome priests with beards and robes were talking, women in headscarves and activists in T-shirts with the image of a human embryo were bustling around. The stairs and walls were covered with photographs of newborns and themed posters. Opponents of abortion gathered at the Salut Hotel.
For three days, festival participants attended trainings and round tables, sharing their experience in promoting anti-abortion ideas. According to Citizen Go program curator Alexandra Mashkova, politicians only notice activists when they form a cohesive group that actively disseminates their ideas. She gave the example of homosexuals. “We know these people exist, and they are probably few,” she said. “But a platform is being created where the opinions of these people, scattered all over the world, are concentrated in one place and it seems that there are many of them.” According to her, supporters of “hostile values” have created powerful tools to promote them: the Avaaz and Change.org platforms. Mashkova called for the use of such practices in the interests of the anti-abortion movement.
The creator of the VKontakte group “Orthodox Grandmothers,” Andrei Kuropatov, boasted of a large number of participants. “There are 50 posts a day - these include recipes for Lenten cuisine and stories from life,” he says. In his group, Kurapatov also raises money to work with pregnant women who intend to have an abortion due to lack of work.
He also did not pass by people with non-traditional sexual orientation. According to him, there are about six million homosexual groups on VKontakte. “We are trying to do something, but we don’t have unity, and we need to get closer and not look at the little things. This reptile is growing exponentially,” complained Kurapatov. He urged everyone who is concerned about this problem to write to him, noting that he “has connections in the investigative committees of all regions” and he can resolve such issues with the help of “telephone law.” Kurapatov did not explain how homosexual communities influence the situation with abortions.
Tatyana Borovikova, head of the organization “Many Children is Good,” spoke about how religious processions miraculously contribute to achieving the goals of the movement. According to her, such events are generally the most effective “of everything that can be done.” At first, her organization relied on the state and business, but very soon Borovikova realized that in order to achieve her goals, it was best to go to prayer services with Daniil of Moscow. After this, for example, all mothers with many children who needed housing received apartments.
“We realized: if we don’t want some disgusting law to be adopted in the State Duma, we just need to walk around it in a religious procession seven times at night,” she enlightened those gathered. Convinced of the effectiveness of this method, activists of the organization began to walk around the Kremlin. “There was a Victory Parade on Red Square, where they wanted to invite 750 people from NATO, and so we, mothers with strollers, two or three people at a time, walked around the Kremlin walls - and for 40 days. It just happened, we didn’t count,” says Borovikova.
Activists proposed dismissing immoral teachers from schools, talked about how homosexuality can be treated with the help of psychological practices, and also about juvenile justice. We also discussed other topics related in one way or another to morality, pedagogy... And, of course, to the prevention of abortion.
At the closing ceremony of the festival, its president Sergei Chesnokov presented the most active activists with awards - glass balls and bracelets. Then those gathered took a large icon and banner out of the hotel and, chanting “Christ is Risen! From the dead, we trampled death with death and bestowed life on those in the tombs!”, they moved in a religious procession around the building, to the great amazement of another group of Chinese tourists. A little later, the festival participants went to dinner, and the Lenta.ru correspondent asked Chesnokov about the event itself and about the means by which the anti-abortion movement plans to achieve its goals.
Lenta.ru: Is the number of festival participants growing from year to year?
Chesnokov: It is growing, at the first there were about 250 people, now there are about 650. But this is not the main indicator. More importantly, the number of participants in the anti-abortion movement is growing. Of course, someone leaves the movement, someone gets tired, burns out...
Where is Vladimir Potikha? Your ardent supporter, who at a meeting of the State Duma presented the coat of arms of the USSR with the image of an embryo in the center.
Yes, then he suffered greatly for it. We “pecked” him because many then thought that these were the views of all participants in the movement, and not his own.
In particular, he spoke positively about Stalin.
But other participants in the movement may have completely opposite views regarding the figure of Stalin. There are people who generally consider him a villain. This is not what unites us. Of course, everyone has a positive assessment of Stalin’s ban on abortion, but they understand that it was purely pragmatic in nature - the country simply needed citizens and a workforce. The question that a child is a person even before birth was not raised. We put this question squarely, since a person begins at the moment of conception.
Quite a controversial statement. Science says that until a certain period, the embryo is not even able to feel pain - its nervous system is not sufficiently developed.
We held a scientific symposium in 2015. One of the speakers was neuroscientist Maureen Kondik from the USA. The results of her research clearly indicate that, at least at the time when abortions are allowed in our country, the child already feels everything.
So, there is a certain period when an abortion can be done?
I'm talking about the moment when the feeling of pain arises. This, by the way, is constantly being lowered. Back in the 1960s - 1970s, it was believed that a newborn (!) did not feel pain, and some operations on newborns were performed without anesthesia. And now someone believes that a child does not experience pain before birth. But the question is how to generally relate to all living things. I believe that a moral feeling begins when a person is able to empathize with the same clattering fly that a spider drags into its web. Even here there is pain.
But such a moral person eats, say, chicken, fish, pig. Don't you feel sorry for them?
It's a pity, of course.
Maybe then people with your views should practice vegetarianism?
In a sense, yes.
Are you a vegetarian?
No, but I admit that we are to blame for those we eat. This moral feeling is still present. It’s just that our religious tradition allows us such eating behavior.
What do you remember most about the festival?
It began with a training session by a fairly well-known time management specialist, Gleb Arkhangelsky. There was also a training “The Science of Victory” on commander Alexander Suvorov, which was conducted by Vyacheslav Letunovsky. He has a very interesting technology for applying Suvorov’s principles to business, and we asked him to apply them to the non-profit sector. And the participants of our festival were satisfied, since we consider one of our main tasks to be training activists who save the lives of children in the regions.
What should an activist be prepared for?
Ideally, he should be a person capable of looking for all ways to protect life, finding an opportunity to protect the life of a child in a variety of situations, in polemics with completely different people, and being able to offer help to a woman. And every time we become convinced that there is also a need for time management...
By the way, after listening to Arkhangelsky, we understood why it is considered a great feat when a young man, and not an old man, gives his life for the country. Because he donates his man-hours, which are given to him by nature. He could live up to 70 years old, but dies at 20. If life is interrupted even before the birth of a child... At the end of the training, I told Gleb that, we hope, with his performance he saved a lot of man-hours, since we will become more efficient in our work and save more children before birth.
So you have a fairly rational approach to this moral problem?
We approach it from different angles because we understand that everything starts with life. At a forum two years ago, we wondered if there had been any scientific event that discussed at what point human life should be protected, when it begins. After all, all our government departments protect the life and health of citizens - the police, the army, and the firefighters. It turned out that no one before us had bothered to puzzle over this point, although scientists have an answer to this question, but no one asks them about it.
What are the views of the scientists you interviewed on this problem?
We interviewed them and have not yet encountered any fundamental contradictions. Among them were both believers and atheists.
And they all said that a person begins at the moment of conception?
From the union of male and female cells and the formation of new DNA. This is a new life, a new person.
For example, amoeba is unicellular. This is also life.
At what stage of division does a fertilized egg turn into a person?
One cell is enough.
Three years ago I was in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior at a meeting regarding the ban on abortion, and one of the speakers stated that abortion cannot be done even for medical reasons, even if the fetus is dead. Do you share this position?
No. But the question is how to understand these medical indications. Now, according to established practice, if there is a suspicion that the life of a pregnant woman is in danger, she undergoes an emergency cleansing (abortion), after which they begin to save her. From our point of view it looks different. We consider this acceptable as long as the doctor makes every effort to save her life while trying to preserve the life of the child. And if, when he did everything he could, he failed, then, as they say, every doctor has his own personal cemetery.
Why are you against in vitro fertilization?
We oppose those IVF operations in which excess embryos are produced and destroyed. If we assume that this would not happen, we would not be against it. But so far we have not been able to find a single clinic that does not do this.
When I listened to the speakers, I noticed that they constantly jumped from the issue of abortion to a discussion of LGBT people and Western values. People are somehow not very keen on this topic. Why?
This is not our main goal. Our manifesto, of course, declares the protection of family values, but we are more focused on protecting life before birth. I believe that talking about non-traditional sexual relationships, even in a negative way, contributes to the spread of this phenomenon.
In your room there was a large painting of a ship, symbolizing Russia, which was about to hit an iceberg, symbolizing abortion. It’s a beautiful metaphor, but there are rafts tied to the ship, on which musician Andrei Makarevich, HSE experts and liberals are sitting. How does this relate to abortion?
Why not?.. Any project aimed at preserving life has the right to exist, but we, of course, evaluate them and say that they may have negative sides. However, I repeat, a negative attitude towards the West in itself is not an official position for us. For example, the same US President Donald Trump is a pro-lifer, in any case, he declares these views to one degree or another.
He declares a lot of things, and then says the exact opposite.
I understand, yes. But there are facts - when he came to power, he stopped funding organizations that advocated family planning and promoted abortion around the world.
Interestingly, thanks to family planning, the number of unwanted pregnancies, and therefore abortions, is reduced.
I admire the verbal balancing act. Such statistics have not yet come into the scope of our research, such as, for example, the moment of the beginning of human life. Maybe we'll get around to it. But I suspect that this is not entirely true. We respect the fact that the ideologists of family planning and birth control present their ideas as very positive and useful for society, but we do not consider them as such.
Family planning is not an option to have an abortion. This involves education about sex, contraception... By the way, are you against contraception?
I personally here agree with the opinion that there are three pillars on which any state stands: military service, paying taxes and having children. Accordingly, this is a citizen’s duty to society. Without fulfilling at least one of them, the state will not stand; if the population refuses to bear children, it is simply incapable of self-reproduction.
Maybe it’s worth educating, educating people about the value of life, helping to improve the quality of life of citizens - which is what family planning centers do, and not ban abortion by law?
I partly agree with you, we also need to engage in education. Although we believe that it is necessary to educate the population in a different sense, in many ways opposite to the so-called family planning programs. It is necessary for the state to ensure a decent life for citizens. But here the following thought arises: they usually say that society is not ready for a ban on abortion, it needs to be educated, and so on. But in fact, it seems to me that society is not ready for freedom. Because if it were ready, then so many abortions would not be performed and so many children’s lives would not be interrupted before birth. Our society is rather ready for prohibitions. And having already banned it, then it will be necessary to engage in his upbringing and educational work.
Will this lead to an increase in clandestine abortions?
First of all, there are still illegal ones. But now more women die from legal abortions than when they were banned. Many pregnant women die from the consequences of abortion. If abortions are banned, then a certain number of women will have illegal ones and a certain percentage will die, but the mortality rate of women in general will sharply decrease.
Does society need an unhappy, perhaps abandoned person, whose birth no one wanted?
I would like to tell you such a case here. During the conference of the St. Andrew the First-Called Foundation on the “Sacredness of Motherhood” program, Academician Ailamazyan, a famous obstetrician-gynecologist, spoke. On the one hand, he confirmed that the child experiences pain before birth, he has a psycho-emotional life, and then said that if he is unwanted, then such a pregnancy “should not happen.” This profound contradiction shocked me. It turns out that if a child is unwanted, even if he feels everything, then he can and should be killed.
Yes, certain projects aimed, for example, at helping pregnant women. Unfortunately, educational activities are still less supported. Although, in my opinion, it is much more effective than charity.
Suppose abortion was banned, everything happened the way you wanted. Will your movement cease to exist?
No. It will move into the plane of educational work. At the first stage - a legal ban on abortion, and at the second - to make sure that parents do not want to do it.
The World Health Organization is sounding the alarm - the number of measles cases is rapidly growing in Europe. In a year - already over 40 thousand people. More than half of the cases occur in Ukraine. The main reason for this surge, according to doctors, is refusal to vaccinate. In Russia, there are ten times fewer cases of infection. But doctors insist: those who do not want to get vaccinated are risking their lives.
For the Trans-Baikal Territory, this is the first case in the last 11 years. A large family, the youngest just turned five months old. Everyone was taken to the hospital with a high fever, cough and a terrible suspicion of measles. According to doctors, these patients did not knowingly get vaccinated against a disease that is eight times more contagious than the flu, and it turns out they could have knowingly infected everyone with whom they interacted.
Personal and religious beliefs, fear, how the body will react to the vaccine - horror stories read on the Internet. People refuse vaccinations for various reasons, but this, doctors believe, only leads to the following figures: according to Rospotrebnadzor, in the first quarter of this year, 843 people were infected with measles in Russia, last year there were only 43.
“Why is the number of cases growing? It is clear that these are isolated cases in Russia, but all these cases are imported from abroad. This disease is brought by our tourists and those people who come from there. Countries dangerous for this disease: Romania, Turkey, Latvia, Indonesia,” notes Galina Melnichenko, deputy chief physician for medical work at children’s city clinic No. 3.
But if in Russia the number of infected people is down to just a few, the situation in Europe is completely different! Doctors are recording a record number of thousands of people who have contracted the dangerous virus over the past 10 years.
In the first six months of 2018, more than 41,000 children and adults were infected with the measles virus in the WHO European Region. The total number of infections during this period significantly exceeds the reported totals for the 12 months of each previous year in the current decade.
In seven countries, according to WHO, more than a thousand people became infected with measles in six months. Ukraine is leading by a wide margin. Maybe that’s why, at the beginning of the year, all the leading TV channels in this country began to show such alarming videos - when in just the first two weeks of the year over a thousand new infected people appeared in the country.
Now the number of cases, according to the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, is close to 29 thousand. A shortage of vaccines is the obvious reason. The European ones turned out to be unaffordable for Ukraine, and when they stopped buying vaccinations in Russia, measles went on the attack, including on neighboring Romania and Moldova. In the latter, by the way, they recently announced an orange level of danger for contracting measles.
“Unvaccinated people - children, adults - are at risk of disease in 100% of cases. This is due to the fact that measles is a highly contagious disease. It is not necessary to have contact with the patient. You can become infected through the ventilation system and by walking through the room where the patient was,” explains Galina Melnichenko.
Measles is transmitted through the air and is dangerous in addition to high fever and rash due to its complications - the disease affects internal organs and can cause pneumonia and meningitis.
Treatment for measles is long and requires serious rehabilitation. Babies from Gagauzi who have developed serious complications will be left under medical supervision for at least 10 days. The infection was brought by unvaccinated children from Ukraine.
Before the invention of the vaccine in 1963, measles not only caused thousands of people to become ill, but thousands of people died. Doctors admit that sometimes vaccinations can actually cause complications. But by getting vaccinated on time, you can protect yourself and your loved ones from a dangerous virus - the measles virus, which most often attacks children under five years of age.
According to Kaspersky Lab, in the second quarter of 2018, attacks using miner programs were detected on the computers of 2.2 million users worldwide. The malicious program can quietly gain a foothold in the system and extract cryptocurrency until the computer crashes. A hidden mining virus can infect a wide variety of devices, including smartphones and tablets. According to experts, hidden miners are becoming more common, while the popularity of ransomware is falling.
A miner program is a device for maintaining the operation of the blockchain and receiving a monetary reward for it. If the user himself installs the miner on his equipment in his premises in order to mine on his own, this is completely legal. However, attackers do not miss the opportunity to take advantage of someone else’s capacity to mine cryptocurrencies without informing the owner. At the same time, Bitcoin, for example, is not practical to mine on home computers; this requires special equipment. And new cryptocurrencies can be mined directly in the browser and even on mobile phones and tablets.
As Kaspersky Lab told Izvestia, harm from the miner can be of different types. During one of the studies, laboratory experts recorded overheating of the phone and its failure due to the additional load on the device’s computing power.
Hidden mining can lead to an increase in electricity bills, slowdown of the device, and even its failure, said antivirus expert Alexey Malanov. - In addition, a very important factor here is that the attacker can stop mining and switch to a more radical way of making money - encrypting the user’s files and demanding a ransom.
The variety of miners is great. There are miners - “programs” for installation on a computer and miners - “hardware” - most often such devices are made in the form of a chip, for example an ASIC. “Hidden” ones, which are quietly fixed in the system, and “polite” ones, which ask permission to mine, or, for example, offer game currency in return. “Native” ones, which are installed on the device, and “web miners”, which mine when visiting a site without being on the computer. “Stationary” and “mobile” - the first mine on computers, and the second on mobile devices. “Loading at 100%” and “adaptive” - the former do not try to maintain the illusion that the device is not infected with anything and use all available resources, while all user activity begins to slow down greatly, the latter pause activity when the user tries to understand operational problems devices.
According to experts, the number of miner attacks is growing. In the second quarter of 2018, Kaspersky Lab researchers discovered about 14 thousand new modifications of miners. At the same time, the number of ransomware attacks is gradually decreasing. The fact is that mining allows you to secretly receive a small, but stable and long-term income. And encrypting user files with a ransom demand potentially provides a large, but one-time income. Today, according to experts, the first option is becoming increasingly preferable for attackers. Additionally, ransomware attacks may attract significantly more attention, including from law enforcement.
Recently, lab researchers discovered a new type of hidden miner - PowerGhost, which is a form of fileless malware that uses the system's own processes to steal computer resources. Once launched on the computer, the software begins to mine an unnamed cryptocurrency. In this case, PowerGhost was mining the Monero cryptocurrency. It is very popular among malware miners because it does not require specialized equipment or even video cards. To mine it effectively, an ordinary processor found in any computer is sufficient.
Our research shows that the miner was primarily targeting corporate networks. What seems most important to us is that the attackers could penetrate the security perimeter of the victim company, and thus all the company’s classified data could be in danger,” explained Kaspersky Lab.
Recommendations for protecting yourself from such cybercrimes are the same as for reducing the risk of infection with any other malware. You must be careful about messages and attachments in letters from unknown senders, do not open links from unreliable sources, regularly update your software, and use a high-quality security solution.
Concerns about overpopulation arose in 1798 after a statement from the Reverend Thomas Malthus, according to which uncontrolled population growth would lead exponentially to famine and poverty.
But the world's population has not and is not increasing exponentially, and is unlikely to ever do so, insists Joel Cohen, a researcher at The Rockefeller University in New York who studies population growth trends. Currently, the growth rate of our planet's population is two times lower than the indicators characteristic before 1965. According to static data, today it is 7.3 billion people, and by 2050 we will reach 9.7 billion. And yet the assertion that population growth rates will almost lead to the end of the world cannot be eradicated. For example, since 1969, the famous physicist Albert Bartlett has given more than 1,742 lectures on exponential population growth and its dire consequences.
The population of the earth also has enough food. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, global food production is outpacing population growth. Moreover, grains alone are enough to feed 10 to 12 billion people. However, the problem of hunger and malnutrition is still relevant. That's because about 55% of the food grown is used to raise livestock, produce fuel and other materials, or is completely thrown away, Cohen points out. The remaining 45% is distributed unevenly - the rich receive more than the poor. The same applies to water shortages, although, paradoxically, 1.2 billion people live in areas with access to this resource.
“Overpopulation is not really overpopulation. The issue here is poverty,” explains Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC. Once again, instead of finding out the cause of poverty and finding ways to ensure decent development of the growing population, sociologists and biologists constantly refer to each other, argue about the definitions and causes of overpopulation.
Citing examples of economic systems that favor the wealthy, Cohen also notes that “even people who have the necessary data use it as an excuse to ignore pressing problems.”
Like other scholars who have weighed in on various myths, Cohen has doubts about the ability to dismantle the theory of overpopulation, which applies to other common misconceptions, but he believes it's worth a try to prevent new "folk art" products from appearing. Many myths arose after researchers extrapolated findings on a narrow topic, as was the case with free radicals. This kind of “expansion of interpretation,” as Spitzer called it, can lead to misconceptions that are very difficult to correct. To avoid this, Spitzer suggests “checking the extent to which extrapolation is justified in order to prevent reasoning from going beyond the available facts.” Plus, as Howard-Jones points out, it all comes down to communication. Scientists must be able to unambiguously present the results of their research, and not make do with the simplest, stock phrases.
After the birth of another myth, it is very unlikely that it will be debunked in the near future. According to the results of psychological research, the very attempt to destroy an established misconception leads to the strengthening of its position. After one experiment in the United States, during which parents were constantly reminded to vaccinate, participants almost stopped vaccinating their children. During another study, the purpose of which was to expose politicians who made empty promises, suspicions crept even towards those public figures who had already fulfilled everything they had previously stated. According to Kirchner, “it is practically impossible to get rid of myths. The more you try to disprove something, the more firmly the idea becomes ingrained in people’s minds.”
