The execution of Ceausescu and his wife on Christmas Day 1989 led to the discovery of the country’s most disturbing secret—enough abandoned children to make up a city had been living in squalor for years, packed into unsanitary orphanages without appropriate resources, care, or stimulation.
Under Ceausescu’s deranged despotism, abortion and birth control were outlawed. He demanded that all women bear at least five children in an effort to create a caste of “worker bees” that would labor in the hive of communism. Invasive investigations of women were conducted at workplaces and elsewhere to track their individual progress in making babies. The government pledged to raise the children whose parents were too poor or incapable of caring for them. Some women never wanted the children they had been ordered to conceive in the first place and were happy to offload them. But many thought their babies would have a better life if given up—or that they had the option of collecting them later if they found the means to properly care for them.
The legacy of this nightmare is very much present in Romania today—and is one of the reasons, nearly twenty-five years after the death of Ceausescu and the bizarre and brutal system he created, that so many Romanian children continue to be abandoned while adult survivors struggle to make a life. A lingering social welfare mentality, coupled with lack of progressive approaches to education, a struggling economy, and halfhearted commitment to rule of law, pressurize the situation.
But if institutionalized children are moved into families early enough, some of the ill effects of neglect in these first years of life can be reversible. Children placed in foster care tested higher on IQ tests than those in orphanages, the BEIP study showed. They developed greater attachment to caregivers, exhibited less anxiety and depression, showed improvements in language skills, and had increased brain activity.
Romania had issued a moratorium on international adoption in 2001, finally outlawing it in 2005 under pressure from EU representatives as the country made its bid for entry into the union. Romanian officials at the time said they could not effectively monitor and control the process, as rumors swirled of babies being sold at auction. But adoption inside Romania hasn’t been a success. Annually, between seven hundred and nine hundred children are adopted of the twelve hundred to fourteen hundred considered “adoptable,” a tiny fraction of the orphans within the system.
Mothers have the option of leaving their newborns at the hospital when they go home. They do not have to give up the rights to the child at this point—or ever. And, as the law states, if the parents or relatives don’t renounce their relationship with the child, the child cannot be adopted. Some are eventually moved into foster care, while others remain at the hospital until they are two, when they can be sent to orphanages.
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