On Thursday, the New York Times’ Sophia Kishkovsky published a piece about alarming news that’s been buzzing in reproductive rights circles for the last couple of weeks – Russia has embraced  their very own anti-choice movement, and it looks strikingly like ours here in the U.S.

This is not news to me as I encountered the nascent Russian anti-choice movement 20 years ago when I attempted to open the first feminist medical center in Moscow, Choices East. My desire to create a Russian version of Choices in New York was sparked when I was confronted with a 35-year-old Russian woman who came to me for her 36th abortion.  At that time, abortion was the major form of birth control in the former Soviet Union, and many immigrants had ten or twenty before coming to Choices.  I listened in mute rage to one story after another of lives blighted by sexually transmitted diseases, domestic violence and hopelessness. For these women, the issue of abortion posed no questions of morality, ethics, or women’s rights versus fetal life.  My patient regarded her multiple abortions pragmatically, as a way of “just getting cleaned out.”

Like so many of her compatriots, she was violently opposed to using birth control. Most Russian gynecologists promoted the idea that the pill caused cancer, and preached the virtues of repeat abortions. Of course, the fact that many of them subsidized their three-dollar-a-month salaries by doing abortions on kitchen tables might well have had an influence on their thinking.

The only contraceptive devices locally produced were condoms, but these were so poorly made that they were called “galoshes,” and few men consented to using them.The two most popular forms of birth control for women were douching with lemon juice and jumping on cardboard boxes when their periods were late.

The slogan of many pro-choice activists in the US—“Abortion on demand and without apology”—was a reality in Russia, but it had little to do with freedom and privacy, and a lot to do with state oppression and coercion.

I visited obstetric wards empty of patients, and was told that one out of three women who sought second trimester abortions in hospitals died from infections stemming from illegal abortions. One woman confided that the brutality of the state maternity wards was Russia’s most effective means of family planning.

When I attempted to bring birth control pills, condoms and insert the first Norplant, I was violently attacked in the press. Calling my plans to set up a women’s clinic in Moscow  with state of the art abortion care an “anti-Russian ploy,” Alexander Sterligov, former KGB general and leader of the Russian National Assembly, was quoted as saying, “We will not put up with Russians having more coffins than cradles.”

By the early 1990s, mirroring the growth of the American anti-choice movement, tapes of Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart had already  aired on Russian television, while a right-to-life conference in Moscow boasted five hundred attendees.

Twenty years later, these sentiments have metastasized into new attempts at legal restrictions, American-style pickets at clinics and appropriation of the English word, “pro-life”. It’s evident that Russia has caught onto Americans’ anti-choice tactics in its continuing assault on women.

The current Russian anti-choice campaign touting the protection of “life” is a smoke screen for the same old State/Church philosophies insuring power and control over women’s bodies. When Stalin criminalized abortion in 1936, a fetus’s right to life was not the agenda; the agenda was to populate Russia with soldiers to counteract Hitler’s rising militarism. In all of these calculations, women are the losers. True reproductive freedom is never under consideration. And so women make the choices they have to make.