Moscow: September 30, 2016. The Russian Orthodox Church is hoping to make all abortions illegal. To that end, Patriarch Kirill has signed a petition that will be given to Russian president Vladimir Putin. According to ChristianToday.com, the Russian Orthodox Church formerly worked to ban government-provided abortions, but is now calling for a ban on private abortions as well. Patriarch Kirill, who described abortion as being “truly a national catastrophe carrying away the lives of more than one million of our fellow citizens every year,” hopes to get one million people to sign the petition. Thus far, 300,000 people have signed it. The petition would ban all forms of abortion, including surgical and drug-induced. It would also ban the morning-after pill. In 2014, there were about one million abortions in Russia, but this does not include the number of abortions at private clinics. Last year, Kirill told the Russian legislative body, "If we manage to cut the number of abortions by 50 per cent we would have stable and powerful population growth." Some lawmakers, however, oppose an abortion ban. Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of the Russian parliament’s upper house, previously called a bill seeking to ban private clinic abortions “extremist.”