‘My body didn’t belong to me’ In Russia’s North Caucasus, women who can’t conceive are shamed and silenced
Chechnya and Ingushetia are the regions in Russia with the highest share of women who reach 50 without having children. Infertility diagnoses are also more common in the North Caucasus than any other parts of the country. Yet in these deeply traditional societies, the subject remains taboo, and women who can’t conceive are often regarded as “defective.” The outlet Takie Dela spoke with Inna Ayrapetyan, co-founder of Sintem, a resource center for women in Chechnya, about the stigma surrounding infertility in the region. Meduza shares a translation of her firsthand account.
Sintem was one of the first social and psychological organizations in the Caucasus. At first, we supported expectant mothers, but soon women who couldn’t conceive began coming to us as well.
These were married women struggling with infertility. Some had an official diagnosis, others didn’t. We referred them to good gynecologists, and a few we supported as they went through IVF, though the attempts were unsuccessful. In the end, the only real help we could offer was psychological support.
I also held counseling sessions for these women. One day, a young woman came to me. Aina [name changed] had been married for two years and still hadn’t been able to conceive. Her relationship with her mother-in-law was strained. We realized it was important for Aina to find common ground with her, to explain that she and her husband were healthy, but that conception simply hadn’t happened yet. She dreaded that conversation, insisting that in her family it wasn’t customary to speak so openly with a mother-in-law, and that she felt embarrassed to raise the subject. But eventually she did — and it helped.
In families in the Caucasus, it’s assumed that a woman should have a baby immediately after marriage. If she can’t conceive, people call her “defective.” Relatives — especially mothers-in-law — start complaining: “Maybe you’re sick? Go back home, let my son marry a healthy woman so he can have children.” This has a devastating effect on women: they begin to feel guilty and to see themselves as flawed.
At one point, Sintem ran a project with mothers-in-law. One of the participants told me: “I feel for everyone who can’t have children. But not for my own daughter-in-law. I have one son, and he needs heirs. You’re a woman from the Caucasus, right? You must understand me.” Her words stunned me. I put myself in her place and realized I could never hurt my own daughter-in-law that way. But sadly, that attitude is very common.
Once we resolved Aina’s conflict with her mother-in-law, we turned to deeper issues. In one session, a childhood memory surfaced. Aina recalled a family in her neighborhood who lost three children in a row. Their sons were killed during shelling in 1999 [in the Second Chechen War], and their daughter later died from carbon monoxide poisoning in a tent camp in Ingushetia. Out of five children, only two survived.
Aina had attended the funerals with her mother. She remembered: “I sat there watching all the tears and suffering. Outside, my mother spoke with another woman who told her, ‘It’s better never to have children at all than to bury them like this.’”
Those words lodged deep inside Aina, and the experience became a lasting trauma. She said it was one reason she couldn’t get pregnant — the world around her seemed just as dangerous and unstable as it had been when she was a child. We worked through it together. Aina later became a mother. She gave birth to a son.
I also remember Lina [name changed]. She came to our center after a suicide attempt. She was a very gentle and beautiful young woman. Lina hadn’t married for love — she’d been abducted. She was just 17. “You know, my husband turned out to be such a good man that I really did start to love him — slowly, gradually,” she told me. But there was a problem: she couldn’t get pregnant.
For the first couple of years, her father- and mother-in-law left her alone. Then they began to complain: “What’s wrong? Why can’t you get pregnant? What’s the matter?” They started taking Lina to various clinics, even outside the republic. She wasn’t happy about it — her relatives kept reminding her how much money they were spending on her.
They stopped letting Lina visit homes where a baby had been born. “I wanted to go congratulate a family member on her first child, but my mother-in-law told me not to. She said that if something happened to the baby, people would blame me,” Lina recalled. Soon came insults and smirks from the elder sister-in-law, who’d already had several children. The psychological pressure grew and grew.
By the time she was 26, Lina had been treated by 20 gynecologists. Her mother-in-law agreed to anything doctors proposed. Lina was prescribed hormones; her weight swung back and forth, but she was met with no sympathy. In an effort to find out why she couldn’t conceive, she was repeatedly subjected to surgeries.
“My body didn’t belong to me. Neither did I,” she told me during our sessions. “The last time they performed a curettage on me, I cried. I said maybe they shouldn’t do it. But I was powerless, because my mother-in-law was standing right outside the door — I wasn’t making any decisions at all.”
Then, the mother-in-law began accompanying Lina into the exam rooms. Her husband also changed, he stopped giving her attention or showing concern. Lina suspected that for the past couple of years, he’d been having an affair. Her mother asked her, “Why are you still there? Don’t you understand? They don’t want you anymore, you need to leave.” But Lina couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Later, when the elder sister-in-law became pregnant for the sixth time, Lina was forbidden even to look at her — in case she “caused” a miscarriage. That was the last straw. Lina packed her things and left. “At some point I realized I didn’t want a child for myself but for them. The baby wasn’t even born yet and I already hated it,” she told me.
Back at her parents’ home, she was overwhelmed by despair. Lina didn’t know how to rebuild her life or what it meant anymore. She’d been taught to believe that if you’re not a mother, you have no place in this world. In the end, she attempted suicide.
When she was brought to us, I spoke with her for a long time — not as a psychologist, but simply as a person. We hugged and cried together. I gave her as much compassion as I could, because I could see she needed it. Only then did I refer her to a psychologist.
Lina never remarried and never became a mother, but she found a different meaning in life. She’s making plans for the future, supported by her parents and friends. Most importantly, she no longer measures her worth by how well she meets society’s expectations. She knows her value lies within herself.
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