What Actually Happens When a Country Bans Abortion
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
As lawmakers in Alabama this week passed a bill that would outlaw abortion in the U.S. state entirely, protesters outside the statehouse wore blood-red robes, a nod to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which childbearing is entirely controlled by the state. Hours later, the book was trending on Twitter.
But opponents of the restrictive abortion laws currently being considered in the United States don’t need to look to fiction for admonitory examples of where these types of laws can lead. For decades, communist Romania was a real-life test case of what can happen when a country outlaws abortion entirely, and the results were devastating.
In 1966, the leader of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, outlawed access to abortion and contraception in a bid to boost the country’s population. In the short term, it worked, and the year after it was enacted the average number of children born to Romanian women jumped from 1.9 to 3.7. But birthrates quickly fell again as women found ways around the ban. Wealthy, urban women were sometimes able to bribe doctors to perform abortions, or they had contraceptive IUDs smuggled in from Germany.
Yet Romania’s prohibition of the procedure was disproportionately felt by low-income women and disadvantaged groups, which abortion-rights advocates in the United States fear would happen if the Alabama law came into force. As a last resort, many Romanian women turned to home and back-alley abortions, and by 1989, an estimated 10,000 women had died as a result of unsafe procedures. The real number of deaths might have been much higher, as women who sought abortions and those who helped them faced years of imprisonment if caught. Maternal mortality skyrocketed, doubling between 1965 and 1989.
“Sometimes a woman couldn’t even tell her husband or best friend that she wanted to have an abortion as it would put them at risk as well,” said Irina Ilisei, an academic researcher and co-founder of the Front Association, a Romanian feminist group, and the Feminist Romania website.
“For many women, sexuality represented a fear and not a part of life that can be enjoyed,” Ilisei said.
Another consequence of Romania’s abortion ban was that hundreds of thousands of children were turned over to state orphanages. When communism collapsed in Romania in 1989, an estimated 170,000 children were found warehoused in filthy orphanages. Having previously been hidden from the world, images emerged of stick-thin children, many of whom had been beaten and abused. Some were left shackled to metal bed frames.
Nor did the Romanian law do much to achieve Ceausescu’s goal of dramatically increasing the population. “Making abortion illegal will not lead to women having more babies. So if the goal is to bring about more lives and to protect more lives, this is not the instrument to use,” said Maria Bucur, a professor of history and gender studies at Indiana University.
Born and raised in Romania, Bucur describes herself as a product of the abortion ban, after her mother twice failed to have an abortion.
On Wednesday, a day after it was passed by the legislature, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law the country’s strictest abortion law, which bans the procedure at every stage of pregnancy and could send doctors who carry out the procedure to prison for life.
Alabama’s law goes even further than Romania’s, which in principle at least allowed for exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or congenital defect. The new law allows for abortions only when there is a serious threat to the mother’s health.
Romania’s abortion ban was compounded by a ban on contraception, which was not mentioned in the Alabama bill. But the Trump administration took a swipe at birth control in 2017 when it allowed employers to opt out of providing it as part of employee insurance plans on the grounds of religious belief. This decision was halted by a federal judge in January of this year.
The legal tussle between the courts over abortion looks set to continue as anti-abortion groups seek to push through laws they hope will be upheld by a newly conservative Supreme Court, to which U.S. President Donald Trump has appointed two new members. So far this year, over a dozen other states have attempted to outlaw abortions after six weeks of gestation—before many people even realize they are pregnant. Last week, Georgia became the sixth state to successfully pass such a bill. Already, six states in the United States have only one abortion clinic left.
Although the laws may be struck down by the courts, anti-abortion advocates hope that they will eventually reach the Supreme Court to challenge the precedent set by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which enshrined the right to seek an abortion.
Alabama State Rep. Terri Collins, a co-sponsor of the bill, which is now the most restrictive in the country, told the news site AL.com , “My goal with this bill, and I think all of our goal, is to have Roe vs. Wade turned over.”
On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump promised to appoint conservative justices with a view to overturning Roe v. Wade . The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh in October 2018 gave conservative justices a solid majority on the bench, raising the hopes of anti-abortion advocates.
If the Supreme Court were to change its mind on abortion, it would become the prerogative of individual states to decide how to regulate the procedure.
“We need to take into consideration the long-term consequences of legislation like this,” said Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the author of Romania’s Abandoned Children.
Starting in 2000, Nelson examined the impact that Romania’s orphanages had on children in post-communist Romania and found that many were left with severe developmental impairment and mental health issues. For some, their confinement in orphanages even had a physical impact on the size of their brains.
Nelson said that Romania offers a cautionary tale of what happens when a state tries to control reproductive rights. The new Alabama law raises questions about what kind of support the state would provide if someone doesn’t have the option of ending a pregnancy when the fetus is found to have profound birth defects.
“Does the state have the bandwidth to take care of those kids and support the families?” he said in an interview.
When communism collapsed in Romania in December 1989, one of the first acts of the transitional government was to overturn the ban on abortion. Romania remains a highly conservative country, and in recent years there have been renewed calls to outlaw abortion, spearheaded by the influential Orthodox Church and other religious groups.
Bucur, the author of Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania, is skeptical that the new movement will gain any political momentum.
“I think the real, raw firsthand memory is still too present in still too many voters. I don’t think there’s any intelligent politicians who would make it happen,” she said.
Ilisei, the Romanian activist, said that she was worried to see parts of the United States—a country that Romania had once looked to as an example—now pursuing new restrictions on abortion. “In 1989, we aspired to build a stable democracy, a pluralistic society, with equality between men and women, and the United States was the main source of inspiration,” she said. “Now that is not the case any more.”
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I remember seeing this on the news in 1989 when Ceacesucu was assassinated by his own people. The world was not aware of the extent of the damage he had done until after he was dead.
Those images of those children still haunt me to this day.
Excellent find Trout. Yes I remember those pictures as well, they were disturbing
Thoughts of Ceacesucu and what he did to his people still haunt me as well.
I need to read up a bit more on them but I think many wanted to be on the firing squad when they were executed
For some reason I want to think he got strung up...but that was Mussolini. I have to wiki it myself
There were not only documented, published stories, but real world experiences of these children.
They were developmentally stunted beyond repair. Like abused and tortured animals who can only lash out.
"Just another fucking experiment".
I heard a story on the radio (NPR, I think) about Romanian adoptees and their hardships even after adoption. One segment told of a woman who had adopted a Romanian boy about 10 or 11 years old, and was forced to relinquish him. She felt terrible, but he was so violent that he was dangerous. He'd tried to push her wheelchair-bound daughter down a set of stairs, and that was the last straw. She had to get him away from her other children, because he was literally trying to kill them.
American adoptive parents were getting a bad rap in many of these adoption cases, because of the high number of failed adoptions. But so many of the adopted children just couldn't be helped. They'd been damaged beyond mending, and couldn't safely live with their adoptive families. And their parents were heartbroken, as they'd come to love those children, but couldn't have a safe home with them.
Heartbreaking situations for all involved.
I recall that as well.
At the time I think the thought was lack of human touch, contact, cuddling, love, human interaction and just human decency mixed with cruelty let the young baby humans develop that way.
I do not know if any new thoughts have surfaced about this.
That's what I heard, too. It's called Reactive Attachment Disorder. A child whose physical and emotional needs aren't met in early childhood understandably has trouble forming attachments to others later in life. A child with this disorder may lack empathy and display violence and cruelty.
A reason all children should be children who are loved and wanted.
Not surprising. Then sprinkle some cruelty on top.
No wonder.
I have to admit that I never knew about what happened in Romania. Now I am going to read up on this.
But what a shining example of what happens when abortion is banned. It's actually terrifying.
What's sad is that's precisely what some prolifers and politicians want here: a banning or at least severe restrictions on abortion. They do not seem able to even contemplate the consequences of banning abortions. To them, there's nothing else but the fetus to consider. Romania paints a grim picture of what happens when abortions are banned. We even got a little taste of that back before Roe when women were dying or being maimed from back alley abortions.
What happened in Romania was well beyond criminal...Under Ceacesucu the orphanages were houses of horror. If I remember correctly American's adopted a number of Romanian children and all suffered from various serious problems.
I remember reading about this. Many adopted Romanian children had been so neglected and abused that they were never able to integrate into their adoptive families. They were a generation of throw-away children.
True, sadly true.
Ceausescu in addition to being a self centered tyrant, was also unbelievably totally corrupt.
Is banning or restricting 'pregnancy termination' really the issue here?
Or, is the real issue forced birth under control of the state?
What's the difference between a State forcing a woman to give birth, "forced birth under control of the state" vs a state or government banning a woman from terminating a pregnancy, forcing her to give birth by taking away her ability to stop it? I don't really see much difference between the two. I would be as against a government forcing abortions on women as I am against their forcing women to give birth by banning abortion.
Have no issue with what you said.
However, reconsider my two questions. They are two separate issues with two separate outcomes.
"Is banning or restricting 'pregnancy termination' really the issue here?"
I think it is. Thousands of women dying from back alley abortions. Hundreds of thousands of unwanted kids "warehoused in filthy orphanages", these are the results of banning abortion which would apply here in these backwards States trying to pass anti-choice legislation just like they did in Romania.
"Or, is the real issue forced birth under control of the state?"
Well in this case the ban on abortion was intended to boost the population, but they apparently didn't go so far as to force pregnancy through systematic rape.
I'm not really seeing the two different outcomes between banning abortion and forced birth under the State. They both lead to the same results, unless of course it was the State forcing abortions on people to reduce or limit population growth. Then they just have the opposite outcomes. But in regards to what is happening in Alabama and other religious conservative majority States, it's the risks of abortion bans that this article is highlighting.
What I mean---is 'the movement' to criminalize pregnancy terminations and------to make 'hallowed ground' the seed of men. This is a power move. A move of subjugation.
'Forced birth under control of the state' places 'the receptors' of that control into what societal status? This is what I am implying----only for purposes of discussion/debate/pondering/thoughts/ideas.
Second class status at best and I have no doubt that animals will be treated better. At least cats and dogs will still get neutered
Am heartened that someone figured out what I was hinting at.
Kudos.
You're not that hard to understand. You write clearly and concisely.
We have a local shelter who will take animals to a vet school to be neutered at a fairly low cost; I used them to get my stray Papa and Mama cats fixed, as well as two of their kittens. They told me that if a female cat (or dog) is pregnant, the vet school will abort the kittens/puppies and continue with the spaying; and they will not tell the shelter about it. This is fine IMO - after all, the whole point is to NOT have any more unwanted kittens or puppies. But I have a few friends who think that is awful. One of them has about 12 feral kittens in her yard, of course. By the time she manages to trap one, it's pregnant again ... and so the cycle continues.
I think the vet school is doing the right thing. One - because there are too many strays and Two - it's good training for the students
Without a doubt. I apologize for reading too far into your comment, I was simply trying to point out that whatever the reason, whether to control a populace i.e. "a power move" or "move of subjugation" or supposed justified reasons like "boosting a nations populace", the suffering the people and up enduring is the same. But you're right, regardless of the motivation, the result is making women second class citizens with fewer rights than even livestock.
You did good. And also, there is much more to 'this issue' than what is readily apparent. Many corners and avenues which are easily overlooked. Agree?
That has become a sad reality, not just for the abortion issue.
Posted by my sister in law on facebook...
Another posted by my son's future mother in law...
I decided to "unfollow" one of them...
Lol could be an interesting wedding reception coming up
Ya think?
Good luck! My daughter's mother-in-law is a peach and I call her Sister.
Yikes Uppy!
Remember to bring a gag to Thanksgiving dinner.
Probably not a bad idea, Perrie. But who would the gag be for...me or her?
Gag for her, wine for you
That works for me!
Induced termination of pregnancy before and after Roe v Wade - NCBI
The author seems to believe that everyone sees this as a bad thing. The politicians working to take away women's rights see it as a good thing. To them, sex has consequences, for women, anyway. And the state will also enforce the "consequences" of rape on women, because they probably wanted it anyway, if they were pregnant. If it had been a legitimate rape, they wouldn't have gotten pregnant, right?
No wonder other countries don't look to us anymore for an example of equality. We've been pandering to groups who are vehemently opposed to equality for women.
Notice how there are no consequences for the men who have sex?
Nope. Sandy stated the truth.
Of course not. Sex without consequences is their God-given right. We chicks can can only have sex if we're both married and ready to be broodmares. If both conditions aren't met, we must either abstain or be labelled slutty welfare queens.
I have been hoping people will wake up and vote accordingly.
Read an article about Austria. Their far right 'Freedom coalition' (ironic the far right always has these kind of names) have either resigned or been removed from government after they were caught on tape trying to get the backing of Russians and get money funneled to them.
As mentioned on another article. we have an idiot in Ohio's state legislature telling us that ectopic pregnancies can be moved to the uterus and carried to term. So we now have some folks in positions of power who think it is possible, and even advisable, to put a woman whose life is already in jeopardy through major surgery, with all its risks, to attempt to save a nonviable pregnancy.
Wake up, ladies. Some people are literally willing to sacrifice your lives to their ignorance.
We have idiots across the spectrum of Republican legislators. Take This one for example:
"There's a window of time when a woman knows she's pregnant that every option that's on the table now is available. She has to do something to know whether she's pregnant or not. It takes time for all the chromosomes to come together." - Republican Clyde Chambliss
It's not that they're just wrong on the issue, they haven't a clue about how nature works and can only speak from their Ivory Christian Tower that is impervious to facts, reality and reason.
Excuse my ignorance, but I'm not even sure how an ectopic pregnancy is aborted. The pregnancy itself is extremely dangerous, but it would seem that the removal would be also. Are medical abortifacients ever used?
Ectopic pregnancy is something of a misnomer, as there is no actual pregnancy taking place. The blastocyst gets stuck in the fallopian tube where it grows until it ruptures the tube. The condition is both painful and potentially lethal, as hemorrhage can occur.
Thank-you for the correction. How is the blastocyst removed?
My friend's mom had to have emergency surgery after the rupture; it almost killed her. I think if they detected it before the rupture, they would have surgically removed it. No other way I can think of.
Happened to my older daughter when she was 26 years old. She was within hours of dying when I took her to the ER.
You're welcome. It's what I do, lol.
When a rupture occurs, surgery is necessary to stop the hemorrhaging. So the blood, injured/dead tissue is removed, taking the blastocyst with it. Often, the injury necessitates surgical removal of the fallopian tube, and in some instances, of the ovary itself.
Oh wow! I didn't realize it entailed all that. So one ectopic "pregnancy" could cause a lifetime of infertility
Only if the other ovary or fallopian tubes are non-functional already, I gotta imagine it's very rare for an ectopic pregnancy to result in the removal of both ovaries and/or tubes
Yes, they used them 2 times on my daughter and her tube still ruptured requiring emergency surgery.
Some cases can be treated without surgery, if they're detected early enough and haven't ruptured. Methotrexate can be administered to cause the pregnancy to regress. Results are monitored by monitoring the patient's pregnancy hormone. Whether an ectopic pregnancy can be managed without surgery depends on how early it is (determined by measuring the pregnancy hormone human chorionic gonadotropin) and whether the patient has symptoms of rupture (pain, dizziness, heavy vaginal bleeding).
Surgery is always performed if a rupture is suspected.
Sometimes, the blastocyst implants somewhere other than a Fallopian tube, and those must be removed surgically. Any remaining placental tissue (it often can't be safely removed due to hemorrhage) is induced to regress with methotrexate.
Indeed. Some surgical repairs can be done laparoscopically, which is less invasive that actual larger surgical incisions.
Not necessarily. If 1 tube is intact and uninjured, then pregnancy can still occur. However, it really depends on the extent of physical damage and scarring, or if there is a history of fertility problems. Ectopic pregnnacy can also increase the risk of future ectopic pregnancies too, again depending on damage and scarring. But a normal pregnancy is still possible.
My SIL had a tubal ligation when she was in her early 20s, then had it reversed after she and my brother married. She had my nephew almost immediately, and then had two ectopic pregnancies, which are more common in women who have had a tubal ligation reversal.
The first of the ectopics ruptured, and because they live out in the sticks, it is very fortunate that the rupture occurred at her workplace, which was her hospital. If it had ruptured at home, she likely wouldn't have survived. They couldn't even wait for my brother to join her before they started surgery.
Between the previous tubal ligations and reversals, and the ectopics, there was too much scar tissue to attempt a repair.
This is one reason why many doctors do not want to perform tubal ligations on younger women.
Which is unusual after tubal reversals. There's usually some fertility issues.
Scarring on the fallopian tube due to injury, surgery, ect., can increase the risk of ectopic pregnancy.
I'm glad we have medical professionals here at NT. I've learned some things in the last few days.
Thanks, y'all
Happy to be of service.
I saw some other nonsense about abortion reversal - I remember one of the members here posted that nonsense before - I wonder why they didn't post it again.
Because they got laughed out of town?
That never seems to stop them.
I think we all know who you mean.
Abortion is a horrible method of birth control. I think that 3rd trimester abortions should only be an emergency procedure. That being said, it seems that those on the right also want to restrict other methods of birth control. Pope Benedict told African women that condoms cause AIDS. Right wing politicians sponsor bills requiring parental consent to buy contraceptives. Some of these new bills will make some contraceptives and iuds illegal. This type of thinking will cause more abortions, legal or otherwise, not fewer.
I challenge anybody to find for me in the Bible where it says that a life starts at conception or that abortion is a sin. I don't recall reading it and I refuse to read that stupid book again. All I know about is genesis 2:7 which I interpret as life starting at first breath.
The Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
But you have to admit, it is effective.
Emergencies are generally the only time 3rd trimester abortions, or any abortion after viability, is performed. But is a pregnancy reaches the 3rd trimester, chances are an induced birth or C-section will be performed. "Abortion" in such instances is usually preceded by fetal demise or serious health complications with the woman.
Such outright lies and misinformation is downright criminal. Especially in Africa where the topic of AIDS is rather taboo.
Not to mention puts undue burden or harm on the woman.
I've noticed at this point in time that you have yet to have any takers.
Yeah, men are dirt! Lol
This whole situation with Romania back in the day both highlights and provides a cautionary tale as to why abortions should be easily available, accessible, and safe. If anything, it provides a good argument FOR abortion.