Decree 770

Decree 770  

“The child is the property of the whole society”

Decree 770 is a Romanian experiment in forced motherhood that began in 1966, and  one of the most horrific humanitarian catastrophes of the 20th century.

Nicolae Ceaușescu decided to build a strong economy in the country. His idea was simple: more people – more hands at work. Decree 770 banned abortions, except in cases where the mother was over 45 years old or already had four children. Contraception was also banned along with the desire to have children. For an abortion – 2 years of imprisonment for the woman and the doctor. 

Women were required to undergo monthly gynecological examinations right at their workplaces. Doctors and ordinary citizens monitored the women, they were nicknamed the “menstrual police”. Upon detection of pregnancy, the woman was obligatorily registered.  

Birth rates sharply jumped to 3.7 per woman. What remained off‑camera: numerous deaths from illegal abortions, but that is far from the only consequence. 

“Decree children” were often born into poor families that could not feed them, people lived in severe poverty without access to  social support, yet the state demanded they have children.

Families began leaving newborns in maternity hospitals, handing them over to orphanages, simply abandoning them on the streets.  By the end of Ceaușescu’s rule, orphanages in the country housed, according to various estimates, between 100,000 and 170,000 children.

The conditions there were monstrous. When Western journalists first entered Romanian orphanages in 1989, they saw something unforgettable. Those black‑and‑white images of various serious psychosomatic disorders, which I show in my second course, come from there. In overcrowded wards, children lay two per crib, in dirty diapers, under

And, as usual, the responsibility was shifted onto women, since they could usually abandon children, in half the cases only after death.

The statistics of underground abortions that crippled and forced people to live with pain are simply horrifying.

And the overseers went for this, for meager privileges.