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Despite Cannes Festival Win, Film Misses Romania Abortion Problems

LifeNews.com ^ | May 28, 2007 | Steven Ertelt

Posted on 05/28/2007 10:13:11 PM PDT by monomaniac

Bucharest, Romania (LifeNews.com) -- The Romanian film "4 months, 3
weeks, 2 days" portrays the plight of a student trying to get an
illegal abortion in the days Communists controlled the country. The
film won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival but media
portrayals of the victory say nothing of how abortion has become a
means of birth control there.

After the fall of communism, one of the first acts of the new
leadership in Romania in 1990 was to legalize abortion.

As doctors learned they could make money from selling abortions to
women, they encouraged the practice and discouraged the use of birth
control. In the first year alone, more than 600,000 abortions were
done in Romania.

That's half as many abortions as were done in the United States that
year, even though the US population was more than 11 times larger that
Romania's at the time.

The number of abortions have since fallen in the eastern European
nation, but one thing hasn't changed. Making abortion legal didn't
make it any safer for women.

The Romania Health Ministry says 15 women died from complications
resulting from legal abortions in 2005 and another 12 women died last
year.

When abortions were at their highest in 1990, a problem began that the
nation's leaders are now trying to tackle -- underpopulation. At the
time, there were two abortions for every life birth -- significantly
higher than the rate of one abortion per three live births in the US
at that time.

Like other eastern European countries where the number of abortions
skyrocketed after legalization, Romania faces underpopulation problems
and many of the nations in the region considering measures to limit
abortions in order to increase the number of births.

Ironically, after the communists instituted the abortion ban, the
birth rate doubled the next year.

Cristian Pop-Eleches, a professor at Columbia University in New York,
says that children born after a nation banned abortion have better
economic and educational success. He indicated last June that they
have "significantly better" educational and labor market achievements
than children born just before.

Pop-Elches points to Romania to make his case.

"Urban, educated women working in good jobs were more likely to have
abortions prior to the policy change," explains Pop-Eleches. "So a
higher proportion of children were born into urban, educated
households after abortion became illegal."

Looking at births from before and after the abortion ban, Pop-Eleches
found that children born after the ban were more likely to finish high
school and to work in a more highly-skilled job.

"The apparently surprising result of superior educational and labor
outcomes of children born after the abortion ban can be explained by
changes in the composition of women having children," writes Pop-
Eleches.

"[The study] indicates that the positive effect due to changes in the
composition of mothers having children more than outweighs all the
other negative effects such a restriction might have had," he says.

Pop-Eleches accounts for the difference in short-term and long-term
outcomes, suggesting that educated women in Romania changed their
behavior more drastically as a result of the ban.