[Original in Russian. Automated and paraphrased translation with minimal edits.]
The ex-Minister of Health of the Perm Territory and the chief pediatrician of the Ural Federal Distric,t Olga Kovtun, on the air of a local TV channel proposed to oblige women to ask permission for abortion from ex-husbands.
“This idea has a humanistic meaning. If a person, previously close, appears in the status of a husband, and he will dissuade a woman, then he will guarantee something to her. To guarantee something that will contribute to her stable life, maybe even a family reunion,” she said.
According to Kovtun, a woman can “go along with someone else’s advice” or be emotionally unprepared for the birth of a child, so an additional limiter can be useful. How this practice will be implemented, she did not specify.
…
At the same time, Kovtun was criticized for failures in administrative work: after joining the Ural State Medical University (USMU), she halved the number of departments. For example, with her, ophthalmology was combined with traumatology and orthopedics. Employees of the university complained that USMU “will graduate students whose knowledge will be slightly higher than that of a paramedic, since the destruction of highly specialized departments will entail the reduction of highly professional specialists.”
Before that, Kovtun headed the Ministry of Health of the Perm Territory and was remembered, first of all, by a series of scandals. She fired about thirty chief doctors of leading medical institutions in an effort to bring in more loyal people. Young parents also suffered: under the leadership of Kovtun, mothers were canceled the issuance of baby food, replacing it with dry mixtures and monetary compensation.
Under her, the Ministry of Health also revised the mechanisms of the ambulance, betting on the involvement of commercial contractors to service calls. “This provoked talk about the redistribution of the multi-million dollar market in favor of specific outsourcing companies,” wrote then the publication “Ura.ru”. In March 2016, a rally was held in Perm against the “collapse of Perm medicine”. The main demand of the protesters was the resignation of Kovtun.
…