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Red Future
14th April 2011, 14:03
Apparently in contrast to the other Eastern Block states Abortion remained banned in Romania ..why ??? was it due to demographic reasons like the Soviet ban in the 1930s.
Ismail
14th April 2011, 15:07
Yes. Difference is Romania was terrible at doing it.

http://countrystudies.us/romania/37.htm

Also people in the 1930's USSR were encouraged to discuss the subject of abortion, as noted by Sarah Davies in Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia. It wasn't just "TODAY COMRADE STALIN WOKE UP AND DECIDED 'I SHALL BAN ABORTION' TODAY." Not that the abortion ban didn't have obvious consequences in the USSR either, but yeah.
Red Future
14th April 2011, 15:16
Yes. Difference is Romania was terrible at doing it.

http://countrystudies.us/romania/37.htm

Also people in the 1930's USSR were encouraged to discuss the subject of abortion, as noted by Sarah Davies in Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia. It wasn't just "TODAY COMRADE STALIN WOKE UP AND DECIDED 'I SHALL BAN ABORTION' TODAY." Not that the abortion ban didn't have obvious consequences in the USSR either, but yeah.

Cheers - that was some excellent info on the subject
TC
14th April 2011, 15:25
Ceausescu also had a self-organized fairly ridiculous personality cult (think more Kim Jong Il, less Joseph Stalin) and an anti-Warsaw pact, vaguely pro-imperialist, pro-Israeli foreign policy, and build himself the largest palace in the world.

Needless to say, there were a whole lot of ways in which Ceausescu's Romania was different from "other" socialist countries. It was not part of the soviet led eastern bloc, and not a socialist state in any meaningful way.
Ismail
14th April 2011, 15:37
Enver Hoxha in 1971 (from Reflections on China Vol. I, p. 536): "Mao received Ceausescu. Hsinhua reported only that he said to him: 'Rumanian comrades, we should unite to bring down imperialism'. As if Ceausescu and company are to bring down imperialism!! If the world waits for the Ceausescus to do such a thing, imperialism will live for tens of thousands of years. It is the proletariat and the peoples that fight imperialism."

Ceaușescu of course maintained a faux-"Non-Aligned" stature like Tito and Kim Il Sung, and like Tito he appealed to the West with his "defiant" posture.