Abortion

Here are some links to articles and a documentary on abortion. Be careful while reading - some are opinion pieces, but they do contain a lot of useful information. Here is the gist of it, highlighting Ceaucescu's Decree 770, but please take a peek at all the articles (they're short and concise):

"The highest abortion rates recorded have been in Romania in 1965, where, among women in the reproductive age from fifteen to forty-four, one in four had an abortion each year (Henshaw and Morrow 1990). The abortion rate in Romania plummeted in 1966 when Romanian dictator Nicolau Ceaucescu banned abortion in an attempt to increase population growth rates. Police surveillance of women included mandatory pelvic examinations and pregnancy tests. This action resulted in higher birth rates, but it was also accompanied by skyrocketing maternal mortality rates including a dramatic increase in deaths from abortion, which caused approximately 85 percent of all maternal deaths. The Romanian maternal mortality rate went from 86 per 100,000 live births in 1966 to 170 per 100,000 live births in the late 1980s—the highest in Europe.

Approximately 10,000 excess maternal deaths due to abortion occurred during the period from 1966–1989 (Serbanescu et al. 2001). Romanian abortion rates again became the highest in the world after Ceaucescu was overthrown in 1989, and abortion mortality rates dropped ( Joffe 1999; Henshaw 1999). Within one year after the fall of the Ceaucescu regime, the maternal mortality rate dropped by 50 per cent. By 1997, there were 21 abortion-related deaths per 100,000 live births (Serbanescu et al. 2001)."
<a href="http://family.jrank.org/pages/5/Abortion-Incidence-Abortion.html">Abortion - Incidence Of Abortion</a>

THE OTHER ARTICLES:

http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn318cohort_of67ed

http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/do-republicans-want-america-to-be-like-romania-in-the-1960s-1980s/question-1550853/

***Here is a link to a DOCUMENTARY that you can view in full (in 7 parts) on YouTube!

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9F9AF9998020C1DE