What Actually Happens When a Country Bans Abortion.
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.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/16/what-actually-happens-when-a-country-bans-abortion-romania-alabama/?fbclid=IwAR2BRAGyaBLsQpy9QDq9K1iBMEnOHGVDardW29F5TG9n7cINKgpIvHG8D5s
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