2005 EventsThe Romanian Studies and Central European Collaborative Carmen Firan, a prolific Romanian-born writer and poet, and Adrian Sangeorzan, a New-York-based gynecologist, offer a vivid and accurate account of what happened in Romania when Ceausescu decided that, if he couldn't expand his territory, at least he would have an ever-growing population. Contraceptives were illegal, and abortion was a crime. In the name of the respect for life, during the twenty-five years of the Ceausescu era Romania has had one of the highest mortality rates among infants and pregnant women. As the quality of life went down day by day, the newspapers and the television heralded great victories and accomplishments in all the fields. Everything was Orwellian and, reading Adrian 's stories, one could ask oneself whether the reality inspired the fiction or was it the other way around . . . In a bitter joke of those times someone asked: What is the ultimate degree of endurance? And the answer was the ultimate degree of endurance is to be Romanian!
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