Abortion in Romania

Abortion in Romania is currently legal as an elective procedure during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, and for medical reasons at later stages of pregnancy. In the year 2004, there were 216,261 live births and 191,000 reported abortions, meaning that 46% of the 407,261 reported pregnancies that year ended in abortion.

Abortion was also legal on-demand from 1957 to 1966. From 1967 to 1990 abortion was severely restricted, in an effort of the Communist leadership to increase the fertility rate of the country.

While the Romanian Communist Party began ruling Romania in 1948, this section focuses on the time period from 1966 to 1989 during Nicolae Ceaușescu's rule.

In 1957 the procedure was officially legalized in Romania, following which 80% of pregnancies ended in abortion, mainly due to the lack of effective contraception. By 1966, the national birthrate had fallen from 19.1 per 1,000 in 1960 to 14.3 per 1,000, a decline that was attributed to the legalization of abortion nine years previously. In an effort to ensure "normal demographic growth", Decree 770 was authorized by Nicolae Ceaușescu's government. The decree criminalized abortion except in the following cases:

The effect of this policy was a sudden transition from a birth rate of 14.3 per 1,000 in 1966 to 27.4 per 1,000 in 1967, though it fell back to 14.3 in 1983.

Initially, this natalist policy was completed with mandatory gynecological revisions and penalties for single women over 25 and married couples without children, but starting in 1977, all "childless persons", regardless of sex or marital status, were fined monthly "contributions" from their wages, whose size depended on the sector in which the person worked. The state glorified child-rearing, and in 1977 assigned official decorations and titles to women who went above and beyond the call of duty and had more than the required number of children.

Upon the death of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in 1965, Ceaușescu succeeded to the leadership of Romania’s Communist Party as General Secretary. Like the previous leader, Ceaușescu officially promoted gender equality, but also desired to increase the nation's population. In his rhetoric, he stressed the "distinguished role and noble mission" found in child-rearing, and promised state-sponsored assistance in the form of childcare centers, accessible medical care, maternity leave, and work protection so that women could combine large families with work outside the home. Ceaușescu's ideas of mandating large families were inspired by Stalinist Soviet Union (abortion was illegal in USSR between 1936 and 1955), as well as by his own conservative upbringing in rural Olt county. Ceaușescu promoted an ideal of the superwoman, active in the workforce, politically involved, raising many children, taking care of the household chores, and succeeding in doing all these at the same time. There were no attempts to provide for equitable sharing of chores within the family (between the husband and wife) - like most communist regimes, Romanian politics too considered it sufficient to promote gender equality in the public sphere, not the private one; the personal relations and gender roles within the family were ignored. Ceaușescu's government was unable to provide much of its promised assistance to families, leaving many families in difficult situations and unable to cope, with the natalist policy being a contributor to the severe problem of child abandonment, where large numbers of children ended living in Romanian orphanages, infamous for institutionalised neglect and abuse. During the 1990s, the street children seen in Romanian cities were a reminder of this policy. A relatively similar policy of restricted reproductive rights during that period also existed in Communist Albania, under Enver Hoxha.

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