Azerbaijan's president Ilham Aliyev has approved a bill banning the advertising of abortion and contraception that is sold without prescription, APA news agency reported on July 13.
The decision is surprising for a secular government like Azerbaijan's, where abortion has been legal since 1955, when it was a Soviet republic. However, the move could be prompted by the decline in birth rates, which dropped from 18.44 per 1,000 people in 2001 to 16.2 in 2014. At the moment, the birth rate in the country stands at slightly below the maintenance level of 2.1 children per woman.
While the population growth rate has declined from over 3% per year in the early 1990s to 1% in recent years, the country's population maintains a positive growth and net migration is zero.
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