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Thursday, May 5th, 2022

What Actually Happens When a Country Bans Abortion

Author:     Amy Mackinnon
Source:     Foreign Policy
Publication Date:     MAY 16, 2019 | 4:38 PM
 Link: What Actually Happens When a Country Bans Abortion
Stephan:   I am old enough to remember when abortion was illegal and "the pill" did not yet exist, and I knew two women, one 22 the other 24 who died from back-alley abortions. And, no, I was not the father, just a friend who observed their dying, and mourns their passing. Making abortion illegal does not end abortion. And in the U.S., a country with the worst maternal mortality, childcare, and early childhood support amongst the developed nations, more unwanted births to mostly low-income girls and women of color are virtually inevitable. And this article is an extreme example of what that looks like. Is this the United States you want?
Romanian orphans in a Bucharest orphanage shortly after the December Revolution in 1989. Credit: Kevin Weaver / Getty

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 […]

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2 Comments

  1. Albus Eddy on Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 7:05 am

    Sadly, in this country both law makers and policy makers learn nothing. Outlawing abortion is the same Folly as the war on drugs. It does not stop the behavior, it just drives it underground. Many will suffer until reason and liberty prevail.

  2. Rev. Dean on Thursday, May 5, 2022 at 6:23 pm

    I remember when women would use a coat-hanger to give themselves an abortion, and it was a terrible and dangerous thing to do for both the fetus and the mother.