Gilberto Ovalle GEA2000
9/13/15
Population Implosion in Russia and Europe

A few years back, the world’s population past 7 billion people and is constantly predicted to increase. With technological and medical advances, people are living longer and reproducing more. Yet, in parts of the world such as Russia and Europe there seems to be an implosion in population as people take social precautions to ensure a more stable lifestyle. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s Russia’s population has shrank from 149 million to 143 million due to dangerous lifestyle choices, despite the in-migration of millions of people from the former USSR. As communism disintegrated, Russian families began to have fewer children and the rate of abortions kept rising (1). In 2004 there were 13 abortions to every 10 births (2). Additionally, the rate (15 per 1000) is higher than the stabilizing birth rate (13 per 1000), with over 150,000 yearly deaths. Parallel to the increasing death rate life expectancy in Russia has steadily been headed downhill, from 71 in 1991 to 63 in 2012 in males. The main reason behind the plummeting life expectancy is due to a large consumption of alcohol, averaging to 3-4 bottles of vodka a week (3), smoking, AIDS, Murders, and accidents. Also, Russia’s capital, Moscow, is one of the two more economically developed cities in the whole country making it more expensive to live in; this makes living there more attractive than poorer cities or towns around the rest of the country, making people make sacrifices like having children just to live more comfortably. Throughout history, Europe population has always constantly been growing, expanding beyond their own borders and colonizing the Americas. The population of Europe has been decreasing since 1965, right after its Total Fertility Rate peak of 2.5 children per woman in Northern,