An acquaintance of mine owns a dacha, but not in the Moscow region, where people tend to be a little better off and drink less than most other places in the country. Her dacha is in the Tver region. A while back, my acquaintance arrived from her village and told me what a strange effect President Vladimir Putin's state-of-the-nation address had had on the residents there.
Her neighbor in the village, a middle-aged woman who is married to an alcoholic tractor driver, had decided to have an illegal late-term abortion. She made no secret of the fact that her husband had insisted on the abortion, that she had resisted as long as she could, and that the reason was money.
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