When Yulia became pregnant last year, her instinct was to have an abortion.

She already had a son — with a man who was jobless and regularly drank himself into oblivion. “He’d use his fist on us,” she said, recoiling at the thought of him. They lived in a small, lightly-built wooden house, more like a summer cottage or dacha. During the months of snow and ice that engulf her native Sakhalin island, in Russia’s Far East, she lived in constant fear of her son freezing to death. Another child would be too much.

Besides, she had not fully recovered from a lopsided C-section when she gave birth. The thought of opening up her scar terrified her. And she had gone through an abortion before, six years earlier.

But when Yulia (not her real name) arrived at a state-run clinic in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the island’s administrative center, ready to go ahead with the termination, she discovered the staff had another plan for her. “I was told I had to wait,” she said.