Soaring abortion rate sounds Stalinist alarm

Sunday Herald ^ | Gabriel Ronay

[nickcarraway]

A 70% termination rate has seen communist rhetoric return to Romania, as pro-life doctors talk of a dying nation.

Campaigning 'pro-life' Romanian doctors counting the cost of sexual licentiousness of the post-communist years claim that it is killing their nation. Democracy, they say, has brought not only personal freedom but an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases and an abortion rate that in 12 years has claimed the equivalent of a third of the country's present population of 24 million.

Seventy per cent of all conceptions in Romania -- conjugal and extramarital -- are terminated by an abortion. The female mortality rate due to botched terminations is up to six times higher than in western or central Europe. Last year, of just more than one million pregnancies, 700,000 ended in an abortion. By comparison, in Britain, outside London, 19.1% of conceptions were terminated.

A further 20% of Romanian women have become sterile as a result of complications. On average, they have five abortions during their sexually active years. As abortion is the favoured method of contraception, especially for teenagers and for women from large, disadvantaged families, alarm bells have started to ring in Bucharest.

But as the nation absorbs the shocking number of terminations, the outlines of a curious pro-life anti-abortion campaign are beginning to emerge. The right of 'ignorant and uneducated women' to decide what to do about an unwanted pregnancy is being challenged by campaigners worried about the 'endangered nation'.

'Romania is a country of abortions', screamed the headline of the Bucharest tabloid Ziua.

The emotive vocabulary of the pro-life activists emulates America's born-again Christian anti- abortion campaigners, but the underlying arguments come straight from the communist era's draconian anti-abortion crusades intended to increase the country's 'heroic working class'.

The pro-life activists appear to have joined forces with the Stalinist guardians of public morality of yesteryear. Under the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, abortion was driven underground to backstreet practitioners, with often terrible consequences for desperate young women denied any control over their own bodies.

They were forced to become 'mother heroes of the fatherland', having up to eight children. Doctors and nurses who carried out abortions were sentenced to death, and their patients, if they survived the backstreet termination, to long jail terms. The new anti-abortion campaigners now speak about mass murders of foetuses and of 'the maiming of Romanian womanhood'. From such emotive language it is but a short step to demand the revival of the communist anti-abortion laws.

Professor Gheorghe Peltecu, director of Bucharest's Filantropia Hospital of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, appears to be at the forefront of the anti-abortion drive.

'The main culprits are the gynaecologists,' he asserted at a pro-life conference in Bucharest. 'I believe that gynaecologists are the principal wrongdoers responsible for the exponential rise of abortions in the country because they consider abortions part of daily medical work.'

He noted that, thanks to liberal post-communist legislations, abortions are readily available at state hospitals. 'Yet there are still many unqualified backstreet abortionists who are prepared to carry out terminations in unhygienic homes. And this is a fact of life for 60% living below the breadline. For them, the real cost of an abortion is a toll too high.'

Uneducated mothers pass on their own uninformed views on sexual mores, pupils get no sexual education in the home or at school and this is why abortion is the most common method of contraception in Romania. Around 20% of women who undergo more than one abortion become infertile as a result of serious complications, the pro-life conference heard.

As most unmarried girls and mothers of large families have multiple terminations, the pro-life lobby appears to challenge the right of these disadvantaged women to decide for themselves whether to bring a child into this world.

The old-fashioned pro-life paternalism has been underscored by some sections of the media asserting that 'the value of virginity is on the up'. The anti-abortion drive is led by male doctors, whose PR machine tries to occupy the moral high ground with a campaign in praise of teenage sexual abstinence. Sections of the media report the news under the catchy headline of The War For Virginity.

The transition for women from baby-producers to individuals in charge of their own bodies has been difficult. But now that the population fails to renew itself, the self-appointed guardians of the nation have swung into action.

Bucharest hospitals have almost doubled the cost of an abortion to 200,000 lei (£40). The cheapest contraceptive costs 50,000 lei (£10). In a country where the average monthly pay is less than £80, most women find even the cheapest contraceptives unaffordable.

Yet there is suspicion that the campaign is not an affirmation of life but a yearning to reduce women to Ceausescu's hero mothers.

[Lorianne]

This was the same country that prior to this had overflowing orphanages where children lived in abominable conditions.

Abortion (and child abandonment before it) are syptoms of a disease, not the disease itself. A 70% abortion rate like the very high baby and child abandonment rate that preceded it is a red flag of a country in deep deep trouble. Romanian society and economy is broken and many people cannot see a way to raise a child in such desparate conditions.

[MattinNJ]

Ping.

[madprof98]

Abortion-on-demand was one of the glorious achievements of Communist rule. Of course, once they granted a privilege, the Stalinists could also revoke it, as they did from time to time in the Soviet Union and in the captive states. What they did not take back, however, was what still endures in those nations: an ethical system which displaced Christianity in favor of secular materialism. These dispirited people are not all that different in their thinking from Western Europeans (and many Americans)today. They're just poorer, so they are less willing to pay for whatever short-term comforts the godless get from children.

[onedoug]

Abortion death cult.

Society is composed of individuals, each of which here, almost exclusively, made a choice that evidently didn't seem quite so inconvenient at the time. Some restoration of morality, on the other hand, would go a longer way toward fixing what most would otherwise use as excuses for their own decadence.

[Coleus]

The price for freedom? What a shame, abortion is now used as contraception in Romania. I guess with the absence of religion, morals and values for 70 yrs. they have a lot of catching up to do. I hope the church is there bringing the people back to the faith.

[Coleus]

ping

[toenail]

This is almost as hysterical and acidic as the Feminist Majority Foundation's daily screeds.

[TaRaRaBoomDeAyGoreLostToday!]

There is a up to $500.00 (not to exceed ever $25,000) fine to any one that kills an 'endangered' fox, or upsets/touches certain turtle nest eggs along our shores. Under the detailed listings of the federal Endangered Species Act.

There is a $350.00 to $500.00 'amount due' to kill the human species. (AKA abortion) And in second/third human trimesters; scissors are jabbed into the HUMAN head and the brains are sucked out-In elective surgeries- daily, in the United States, all under the guise of a woman's "right." The only real "right" is the "right" to remain silent.

When will humans become "endangered" and protected?

When will the so called pro-"choicers" realize basic science skills of the food-chain? Human's are NOT at the bottom of the food-chain.

Do they really see what they do, with their political correctness all in the guise of a "woman's right"?

[Coleus]

Feminist Majority Foundation>>

Who are they?

[toenail]

http://www.feminist.org/ -- bunch of histrionic whiners.