30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This was a huge social experiment the pro-life vs pro-choice debaters can learn from.
If you want to see a documentary on the subject this is a good one: https://youtu.be/ZgZJ-IV8Et0
Where does it say that? I might have missed it. Abandoning a child for having a leg deformity doesn't strike me as if he was wanted much.
Anyway, the poor conditions in the orphanages and children hospitals were a result of overcrowding and this happened due to Ceaușescu's policies that turned Romania into a baby factory. And there was also the issue that children with disabilities were incompatible with communism's "new man" ideal, so the orphanages for children with disabilities were genuine horrors.
The accident cost him his hand _and_ his parents.
I guess "life" and "choice" are just references to things that the respective partisans bring up when arguing. Which would imply that my argument above is wrong: it's not about accurately describing a social situation, but about giving an argument a short name.
Which has a problem of its own. It's limiting. It implies that if you're against abortions, then that's because of the validity of some "life" argument, or the invalidity of some "choice" argument. Over time, it probably makes the debates stupider.
Why give names to arguments (pro-choice, pro-life)? Why not just say pro-abortion, anti-abortion? Because you want to appeal to peoples' preexisting biases? If that's the case, it's a bad attitude towards debate.
> Why not just say pro-abortion, anti-abortion?
Because almost no one is "pro-abortion". It's a horrible and traumatic experience to go through and no one is happy to have one. That doesn't mean that women shouldn't have the option to do it. That's why pro-choice works better - it's just more descriptive of the actual issue.
https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.h...
This is not the case. Even if the foetus is a human person, body autonomy tells us that no person should be forced to give up their own bodily well being in ensure the survival of someone else.
Let's say that a person needs a kidney or they will day, would it be OK to force the only compatible donor to donate his because he can survive without it? If not, how is it fine to force a woman to go through nine months of pregnancy? Pregnancy and birth can be harmful to the body, and even put the mother's life at risk.
It's common to say that the "pro-life vs. pro-choice" debate is all about whether the foetus is a person of not, but that's a misdirect. You can resolve that question and still find yourself trying to solve essentially the trolley problem.
Thats a pretty terrible analogy. Getting pregnant is not something you cannot avoid. That would assume that people have no responsibility in their current condition.
The rape pregency is a different matter. Before safe abortions the mother had the baby and treated it as an innocent child. Some would be given up for adoption. Some societies force the rapist to pay. No society killed the baby when it was born.
Unless you promote not having sex at all, then yes, it’s something you cannot avoid. You can take precautions, but contraception fails.
And that still doesn’t even touch topics such as rape.
She got pregnant anyway. The nurses were so incredulous, they tested her four times, said it was impossible, and finally gave her a blood test to confirm.
We caught it very early, and it was ectopic. Her doctor said if she didn't abort it, she would likely die. Even a healthy pregnancy is more likely to kill you than an abortion in the first trimester.
Anyway, my point is that none of this is your or the govt's business. It was between her and her doctor. Someone can be 100% responsible and still be in a regrettable medical situation, and no one should have the authority to say, "You need to die or risk dying for this cluster of cells."
I know what you mean but this triggered me for some reason :)
It was a likely-fatal medical condition. It was impossible to bring to term and produce a healthy baby.
"Caught" implies that we discovered the pregnancy before it progressed into a more dangerous phase. "It" refers to the pregnancy.
Humans may want to see meaning in certain rapidly-growing clusters of cells, but that doesn't make them less dangerous if they're growing in the wrong part of the body.
I would say exact opposite. It is the key question, because if there is no fetus-person claim, the whole issue is moot as there is no entity to which pregnant person has moral responsibility.
But if we assume a fetus is a person with all personal rights, it is just clash of rights and freedoms of two persons, which may turn out both ways based on relative valuations of these rights in a society. Personal autonomy is a strong card, but there are many cases where it is restricted to protect life of others (involuntary treatment of mentally ill or forced isolation of infected).
Also, the case is stronger as (with the exception of rape) parents are mostly responsible for conception of child. One can say that it was not their decision and contraceptions can fail, but the same can be said for car accidents.
OTOH, the fetus-person position is here only because it is a forced religious idea on secular society. So it is much more clear-cut to just reject fetus-person proposition on secular grounds. (We already did something similar for braindead cases that are biologically alive.) Without that 'pro-life' position has no standing. By abandoning fetus-person debate and making the debate about personal autonomy, the 'pro-choice' side just unnecessary weakened their case.
This question is essentially unsolvable from a philosophical point of view. Laws and people will take their stand about when human life beings, but there is no objective definition that will solve this. Making the debate about an unsolvable question makes the debate unsolvable. This makes it very difficult to change existing laws. This "debate" favors whichever side the current laws already favor.
In liberal society restricting personal freedom requires strong claim of necessity. Therefore it is a burden of 'pro-life' side to make such strong claim. As such claim requires fetus-person claim, the 'pro-life' side would need to show that (or at least show that it is universally hold position in society).
Exactly. I think it helps to steer the debate towards the assumption that the fetus is a human being since it exists. The mother does not have the right to kill it as it would be murder. However, the mother has the right to stop her pregnancy since it is her body. Now the kick is: These two statements are not contradictory! If the fetus is viable then his life can be saved by the doctors, otherwise it will die. In either case, it is not the (legal) responsibility of the mother.
Of course, the mother would be probably a douchebag if she tries to interrupt a pregnancy at 8 months, but that's a different issue.
A newborn baby is pretty much helpless and needs its mother/other. If we go just by that, it means a new mother does nothing wrong if they leave their kid outside in the sun for 5 days until it dies. After all, no-one should give their 'bodily' well being. Yes, you can give him for adoption, etc, but by the logic here it means if a mother just leaves their kids to starve, not kill them directly, but not doing 'motherly' things, it is ok, after all, they aren't fully responsible.
(again, not taking sides in the pro-life/pro-choice argument, just stating it isn't black or white)
EDIT: to clarify, I'm not really unbiased about that and I do take sides: I think that people have the right to control their bodies, and thus women have the right to have abortions. (I also think that abortion is wrong when there's no risk of physical trauma for the woman, but hey, people have the right to do wrong things!)
https://quillette.com/2019/05/21/rethinking-abortion-advocac...
https://m.soundcloud.com/therightsideirl/interview-coleman-h...
In general, "pro-life" people are not pro-life, they are pro-soul, but they know instinctively that's a debate they can't win, so they change the name. It's, in my opinion, a big, big hypocrisy.
Even then, not really. Otherwise Pro-Life adherents would push policies that reduce the number of abortions overall—like better access to and education about birth control—over policies that don’t—like making abortions illegal. Instead, they demonstrate that their goal isn’t to actually reduce the number of abortions overall.
Living people making unwanted intrusions into one’s body, even where one has previously consented, can generally be forcibly stopped from that intrusion. There are basically no circumstances where being alive itself gives someone the kind of claim on someone else’s body necessary to sustain a fetus. So, no, the conclusion you present does not follow from the assumption that the fetus is a living human person with all the rights and privileges usually associated with that status. It still requires assumption of novel, sui generis, privileges.
Except that some pro-choice advocates admit that it is a human life being killed and still insist it is good and necessary. That and most of the rest of the pro-choice activists would never accept being forced into making a determination on when they believe life begins. They don't care when life begins. They care about not restricting abortion.
Edit: I should have read other comments here first. As you can see, many pro-choice people are perfectly willing to acknowledge that they are willing to allow abortion even though it is a person. In other words, actively killing your child if you don't want to support them.
I am also pro euthanasia
Being in favour of something it doesn't mean you hope things will go south
You support their existence exactly because if things go south it's better to have them
I am not pro choice, I am anti anti abortists
I am pro-abortion, because I understand that it's a traumatic experience, which nonetheless can be very desirable given some circumstances. If you're trying to side-step the fact that no-one ideally would have an abortion, you're just opening yourself up to counter-arguments attacking exactly that, and that's dumb, because you've detracted the debate from the true point (from a pro-abortion viewpoint) – sometimes it's a necessary sacrifice.
Your local puritanical propaganda is winning, it would seem. I'm european. I see the conversation as explicitly pro-abortion and anti-abortion. Now and then the anti-abortionists try to americanize and call themselves pro-life but few buy it.
If it is a bodily autonomy issue shouldn't those choices be responsible for the economical realities of those choices?
It's a clear case of taxation without representation.
I understand the argument that it's wrong to force a woman to carry and bear a child. It seems, though, that the lesser evil of forcing a man to give money to that woman shouldn't be allowed under similar ethical reasoning.
(I.e. if it's okay to kill a foetus, it's okay to economically disavow it.)
But this argument would be very unpopular.
Assuming no rape/nonconsent in either scenario:
Male impregnates a female and regrets it: too bad, you're held responsible and have to help take care of the offspring.
Female gets impregnated and regrets it: you're not held responsible, you're allowed to kill the offspring and don't have to help take care of it if you don't want to.
Chivalry never died, in a strange sort of way. I'm not complaining about this; I just find it interesting to point it out.
compression is the mother of persuasion
This term exists: it's yet another loaded, biased term: one that has been historically used by pro-life advocates to label pro-choice advocates.
... does NOT mean pro-choice. It means "limit the ability to choose in favor of the right choices".
I, personally, like both "pro-choice" and "pro-life" names. These names represent underlying positions well. These names also have a good balance [between brevity, clarity, and highlighting key differences].
(anyone know how much lead there was in romanian petrol circa 1969?)
While the Ceausescus were hated, it is definitely not a given that popular discontent would have led to their deaths had it not been for that cabal that hastily arranged the trial and executions.
Ceaușescu was killed because the terrorists wouldn't give up otherwise, the terrorists being suspected to be the old secret police, which also wreaked havoc in Timișoara.
“Pro-life” Americans would be well advised to see the movie, as a reminder of what would quickly be happening in their own country if a complete ban on abortions were to happen.
The products of autocratic governments are depressingly predictable.
Ostensibly, atrocities like this are done for the people - and yet, they are completely devoid of humanity.
It says that in the case of Romania, warehousing children was a disaster on the scale of Dachau in WW2.
Psychology textbooks had to be rewritten afterwards as this level of child neglect was never contemplated - no biological or custodial parents to pattern their behavior.
One observation I'll make is that although adoption is considered a noble act in the US, many other countries consider it be throwing your baby away to be exploited.
People that I've talked to in the Philippines and Indonesia visibly recoiled when I mentioned the word "adoption", so there must be an unfortunate history there.
Adoption is considered a noble act in Romania
After the scandals, international adoptions were banned until recently.
There's some kind of disconnect here where it seems like Romanians are brigading on my post without actually reading the article.
There were just so many abandoned children that there were too few people willing to adopt them. Most people prefer to conceive their own children rather than adopting. Eve of those that want to adopt, they will often conceive a child before feeling ready to go through the adoption process, and few people can afford more than one child.
But that is not proof it can't work, just like how one bad parent isn't proof all parents are bad.
But a skilled government can gather more data and insights than any one individual, so it stands too reason they could produce a program that's better than what many or most parents can come up with on their own. In fact, that is precisely how modern day education ages 4-16 started out. Near universal literacy is one of its fruits. Why not more?
Primary schooling is fine, as long as everyone comes out literate and numerate.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201003...
I would say schools in general are more about warehousing kids than learning, although some kids do end up learning things they wouldn't have otherwise (while others end up not being able to learn things they would have learned otherwise).
Related to this discussion, several secular intentional communities in the US have attempted communal child raising and as far as I am aware all stopped after finding it to be worse than having parents be primary caregivers. Twin Oaks is the one I remember by name if anyone wants to go looking for info; I know their experience has been written about in books, I don't know if there is anything online. I am sure there were at least two other such attempts but I can't remember the communities right now. It seems kids really need at least one and not too many primary caregivers.
Foster care in the few states I know about in the US has serious problems. The interests of governments are not usually aligned with the interests of humans.
Parents do learn from the experiences of other parents and people everywhere are always looking for ways to do that better, but there are enough things that just don't work well that being too organized about it is likely to be counterproductive.
More widely I wish people (like you) would not generalise their reasonably happy childhoods onto others. I'm glad you had what others do not, but don't assume it's a universal.
Only in extreme cases does one bad (taking a child away from parent figures) justify removing them and putting them in a state run system (another bad). There’s certainly a place for that, but it’s at the extremes.
Many would like to claim that the state should raise kids. That’s a stance that does great harm to parents and children alike.
"Many"? Justify that. I've never heard anyone make such a broad and foolish generalisation.
> ...There’s certainly a place for that, but it’s at the extremes.
That's exactly what I'm saying, that those extremes do exist and need to be considered. I never suggested it generally. I was careful not to.
Very very sad and I am happy a lot has changed since then.
> nearly inedible, watered-down food
> Hepatitis B and HIV/AIDS ravaged the Romanian orphanages
> naked children on benches
> overcrowded rooms where [...] orphans endlessly rocked, or punched themselves in the face, or shrieked
And at one point I think the article does draw a comparison with the liberation of nazi concentration camps?
Not sure were you get the nostalgia from.
A question always pops into my mind, reading about the effects of this kind of deprivation on children. At what age do love and affection transition from an inherent need to a frivolous want? From something it’s unconscionable for a person to lack, to something where Hollywood is castigated for conditioning people to expect it? Where is the developmental cut line?
Hollywood is (rightfully) castigated for setting unrealistic beauty standards and expectations for young men and women, and for misrepresenting how healthy romance and relationships work.
Love is out there for everyone (...I hope), but a good chunk of our media influences suggest and imply that men should have an expectation that women will automatically find them as an attractive partner or reinforce that they’re somehow “entitled” to a sexual experience - these broken expectations form the basis of many (but not all) of the misogynistic anger that fuels the Incel movement.
Why do you focus on men? It seems to me that all humans expect to be "entitled" to sexual experiences.
If you need sex, most people have at least one working hand that can take care of that urge for you.
Humans are social animals, however, and have such a strong desire for love and friendship that lack of it, at any age, leads to dysfunction.
How does the media suggest that women will automatically find men attractive? My experience says otherwise. You have to be fit, have success in life, have money, have a beautiful smile, which is NOT what incels are. All these "requisites" for a woman to find you attractive can be explained also from a biological point of view.
This is also an oversimplification. The problem is that the movie and ad industries strongly reinforce and popularize and some standards.
And export them to the whole world.
> How does the media suggest that women will automatically find men attractive? My experience says otherwise. You have to be fit, have success in life, have money, have a beautiful smile, which is NOT what incels are.
I agree and this is also part of the problem. Pushing some arbitrary standards onto men is also harmful.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of people feel they insecure about themselves and angry about society.
Sometimes this insecurity and anger fuels the sale of cosmetics, gym memberships, clothing and dubious "self-help" books. Sometimes it gets uglier.
> All these "requisites" for a woman to find you attractive can be explained also from a biological point of view.
Please hold on on the strong biological determinism. It's largely refuted by geneticists and anthropologist. Reality is way more complex.
https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/studies/HarlowMLE.htm is probably enough of a start (monkeys ca. 1950). I dimly recall "imprinting" studies in other species from the 1970s.
Adults that are loved do thrive, usually.
On the other hand, lonely people do suffer a lot.
The result is that a lot of people probably feel like they’ve been had. They’ve been telling themselves that they can or should do things that scare away their love interests and end up with a relationship. They want to believe in a special soul mate for everyone. The reality is that sex and relationships are both easier and less fulfilling than they’ve come to believe.
I've been browsing hn.algolia.com for articles posted in the past year about various countries and I think Romania wins hands down on bad image. Is Romania the bogeyman of civilisation? Well, supposedly Dracula comes from here too!
Just a side comment.
It's in an odd limbo where some elements are well in front of many countries (like connectivity, almost unparralled) whereas others, like poor infrastructure (like that stunt of the businessman building more highway the government) and a perception of the politics still being ruled by pandering to pensioners.
Were it not for Brexit and my almost certain inability to get RO citizenship any time soon, we'd probably have moved out for a few years as things will still come on leaps and bounds.
What's going on with the fact checkers @ the Atlantic?
Romania "contributes to 21% of registered victims, 21% of suspects of conducting trafficking and 44% of prosecutions at the EU level.". https://www.euractiv.com/section/all/opinion/human-trafficki...
"Romania is plagued by a seedy evil: sex trafficking. It’s Europe’s undisputed sex worker production factory and it might be interesting to understand why. " https://www.insideover.com/society/how-romania-became-europe...
"Cluj-Napoca, Romania’s fourth largest city, has the dubious distinction of housing Europe’s largest waste-related ghetto." https://meta.eeb.org/2019/08/29/treated-like-trash-how-roma-...
"A newspaper investigation found that disinfectant used in Romanian operating rooms was ten times weaker than it should have been, and the people are angry. " https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/dp5a3m/romania-hospitals-...
And the list goes on. It will be 2200 and Romanians will still blame it on communism. Even here you can see many are trying to bury rampant corruption and discrimination. It is so common in that country that the society will instead try and hide facts only to sugar coat things.
https://www.google.com/search?q=kayla+bourque+romanian+orpha...
This foreign adoption lobby was so powerful that the US government pressured Romanian authorities to keep allowing the black market of no-red-tape foreign adoptions after the 2001 ban: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05BUCHAREST1173_a.html
Those few voices outside the choir were silenced: http://www.roeliepost.com/
Fun fact: Romania's current president and his wife made a fortune as middlemen for foreigners buying children from poor families - https://evz.ro/purtatorul-de-cuvant-al-pnl-alina-gorghiu-con...
There are currently tens of thousands of abandoned children in Romania that nobody wants to adopt. And many of Romania's orphanages are still terrible.
And your last sentence isn't a "fact", but an unsupported allegation. For it to be a fact you'd need actual proof, instead of links from shitty journals.
I'm a Romanian living in Romania btw.
A mere Google search reveals more than 20 newspapers supporting the claim that he was somewhat involved in shady business with children - heck there are even filmed investigations with multiple people/families claiming on camera that he glued the offer with the demand.
Yes, because he did that on national television, congratulating the miners afterwards for their civic spirit. Really poor analogy btw.
I'm not surprised. How about the house he just lost in Brasov's court which concluded it was acquired with fake documents? I know: "Shitty court"
If we are talking about what constitutes proof, I can tell what isn't proof ... proof isn't a link from a journal guilty of yellow journalism and of spreading false news, that doesn't cite any credible source, an article written just before the presidential elections from 2014, an obvious hit piece.
Don't link to such junk and I won't pick on you for doing so.
One of those statements that makes an eyebrow go suborbital
Something about human nature...? there is a downvote button there and it feels empowering (?) and satisfying (?) to see someone you disagree with go grey
I will tell you my simple answer for this: Yes. If in the end the results are better for humanity as whole, I can tell you, I, personally, am fine with buying people for money and even with other, even LESS moral means. I think we should not let our sense of morality stay in the way of what could improve things. I know it sound horrible, heartless and imoral, but there are plenty of cases along history when taking the moral high ground led to worse outcomes for everyone involved.
I will tell you the reason why he's downvoted. His talking points were based on mostly nationalistic sentiment and used as a talking point in the Romanian elections and politics for a LONG time and by a lot of self-interested people. There is a lot of background to the national context here that's hard to explain, but for example, last 2 election cycles, our current president, Klaus Johannis, was being painted by the opposition as a child trafficker because sometime in the 90's assisted with an adoption of a child by a canadian couple. They tried paining him as a child trafficker and promoting obvious lies, such that the children were sold so that they would harvest their organs. Really egregious stuff.
They basically fan the flames of the "us, the great Romania" against the "evil and manipulative West that is holding us down" that was planted _very_ deep in the Romania psyche by the communist regime. I assume most downvotes came from Romanians, of witch, I assume, there are many more on HN than one would believe.
(I didn't downvote.)
Edit: i witnessed all this and recorded it.
Yes there were cases that shocked the public were people were forced, but those are isolated and not tolerated. It's like saying that's a common practice for Austrians to hold in their basement teenage girls.
I'm not gonna respond to any of your replys because it's pointless.
How do you deal with stealing being acceptable for one group of people. Do you allow this because not allowing is racist? Because that's where we end up with your comment.