Legalizing abortion might not appear to be a priority for a post-revolutionary government. But it was crucial for the women of Romania. An underground poem that circulated through Bucharest before the Romanian revolution summed up the anguish of a people caught between the birth squads and the death squads: "For a foetus to be aborted is a terrible fate," it said. "But to be born is even worse."
To outsiders the legalization of abortion might seem a curious priority: the new government announced it on its first day in office, along with the scrapping of the village systematization plan and an end to rationing. To Romanians, subject for years to what one dissident called "state control of a woman's womb", it represented a cornerstone of liberation.
Iolanda Stranescu, President of the British Romanian Association, said: "This is an act of humanity. The birth policy was one of the most hated decrees. The humiliation and suffering it caused are almost impossible to describe."
Though the new regime has not yet spelled out the details, observers understand that the move on abortion will be coupled with the lifting of a ban on contraception, thus dismantling the machinery with which Ceausescu and his wife Elena, who was in charge of "women's policies", pursued their crazed dream of population growth.
Relief organizations, such as the World Union of Free Romanians, are already adding contraceptives to their supplies of medical needs. Anca Panter, a member of the emergency committee, says: "It's not the sort of thing you would think of first when people are cold and hungry and many are dying from their wounds. But it is vital for the future.
"Of course we are delighted by the legalization of abortion: we all know women who lost their lives in illegal abortions. But you want abortion to be a last resort for all kinds of reasons. When you're trying to restore the health of the nation you do not want hospital beds taken up with abortions.
"The problem is that Romania simply does not have any contraceptives. They do not make them and they do not have the money to buy them. We should be grateful for any we can get."
The leading charity in the field is the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which represents family planning organizations in 132 countries. "There was a family planning organization there once but obviously it has been dormant for many years," says Jeremy Hamand, IPPF's publications editor. "The question now is how quickly they can restore normality. The main thing will be supplies. We would probably send pills and condoms at first because they are comparatively simple to distribute."
One of the world's biggest buyers of contraceptives, IPPF donates supplies or cash to local organizations, which then decide whether to charge any fee. The charity has also helped in Poland, and is in the process of setting up family planning groups in the Soviet Union in an attempt to cut the abortion rate - women there have as many as six each.
Hamand is not surprised by the swiftness with which the Ceausescu birth policy was revoked. "It was a violation of one of the most basic human rights. We carried out a survey of eight eastern European countries and Romania's situation was by far the most dreadful."
The obsessive pursuit of population growth - the Ceausescus believed that the "magic number" of 30 million Romanians by the year 2000 would somehow give them more global influence - began in 1966, with the ban on abortions, and was implemented with increasing ferocity. Women were required to bear four, then five, children, "encouraged" by the slender carrot of financial reward and the hefty sticks of taxation on childlessness and draconian punishments for illegal abortion.
Ceausescu spelled it out a decade ago when he declared that the foetus was "the socialist property of the entire society. Those who deliberately refuse are deserters trying to escape the laws of national continuity".
Anyone unmarried by the age of 25 faced an additional tax burden of as much as 10 per cent. Couples failing to produce a baby after two years without medical explanation faced similar economic burdens. At the same time women were encouraged to produce children regardless of whether they had a husband; even unmarried teenage girls came under pressure. Paternity was said to be "a hangover of a corrupt society. The truly noble thing is to stimulate the birth rate".
Legal abortions were permitted in cases of incest, where the mother's life was threatened, where there was damage to the foetus, if she had already had the required the number of children, or if she was aged over 40. But doctors were not only punished for illegal terminations; they could also be prosecuted if it was thought they had been over-zealous in performing legal ones.
As a result, an increasing number of women sought out back street abortionists and deaths from complications soared. In 1980, for instance, it was estimated that the rate was 100 per million women, one of the highest in the world. Consultants who, on admitting a woman to hospital, suspected that an abortion had been induced, were supposed to call in a member of the security forces to question the patient before treatment was allowed.
Dr Adriana Marian recalls this happening during her training. "Some doctors would close their eyes but it was very dangerous," she says. "You knew informers were about. Because day-to-day life was so difficult people did not want to have more children, and they managed to find all kinds of ways round it."
Some, she says, tried homemade contraceptives. Her own mother-in-law, a pharmacist, could concoct a reasonably effective spermicide. Most Romanians, though, were driven to abortifacients.
"There was a lot of septicaemia. I've seen very young women die because they were beyond the reach of antibiotics - which were in short supply anyway." Marian fled to this country five years ago with her husband and son, Vlad, now aged 10.
She says compulsory monthly pregnancy tests were also introduced for Romanian women at their work places. "There are no sophisticated urine tests, so it was a matter of an internal examination. You can imagine how humiliating it was. Older women were encouraged to spy on younger ones and to report anything, like vomiting, that could be a symptom of pregnancy."
Women who were found to be pregnant were required to produce a baby. Failure to do so without medical proof of spontaneous miscarriage could result in charges.
"For some people not having a child became an act of defiance, a form of dissent," Marian says. "Of course, there were others who really wanted children, but who could not conceive, and the stress made it worse."
Iolanda Stranescu says: "You must also think of the birth policy against the background of food and heat shortages. Power cuts in hospitals are frequent and hygiene is dismal because of the lack of cleaning materials.
"Because the infant mortality rate was so high babies were not registered until they were six weeks old. So it is as if all those newborns who died had never existed." But even official figures put the rate at 26 deaths per 1,000 births, a level three times that of East Germany.
"To be forced to bear children that you cannot feed is the most terrible thing," Stranescu says.
No one seems to expect much opposition to legal abortion and contraception from the Romanian Orthodox Church. Nor do they expect a situation where abortion becomes the main method of birth control. "People used to pay a fortune for contraceptives on the black market," Stranescu says.
Despite the zeal with which it was pursued, Ceausescu's population growth policy was a failure. The birth rate remained at around 14 per thousand; there are 23 million Romanians. The final irony may be that Ceausescu's death will achieve what his life could not: a baby boom. Marian says: "What they managed to do was change people's natural instincts from wanting to have children to not wanting them. Now that people have freedom it may be different."
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