History, Population Policies, and Fertility Decline in Eastern Europe: A Case Study more

Journal of Family History http://jfh.sagepub.com History, Population Policies, and Fertility Decline in Eastern Europe: A Case Study Cristina Bradatan and Glenn Firebaugh Journal of Family History 2007; 32; 179 DOI: 10.1177/0363199006297732 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jfh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/32/2/179 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Journal of Family History can be found at: Email Alerts: http://jfh.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://jfh.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 HISTORY, POPULATION POLICIES, AND FERTILITY DECLINE IN EASTERN EUROPE: A CASE STUDY Cristina Bradatan Glenn Firebaugh Why does Eastern Europe have the lowest fertility in the world? Most explanations focus on the consequences of upheaval in that region during the 1990s. These socalled “transition” explanations miss a major part of the story. For the Romanian case, we show that the decline in fertility over the 1990s represents the continuation of a longstanding trend that was only interrupted by the extremely efficient pro-natalist policies inaugurated in the 1960s. We conclude that the conventional transition explanations of the 1990s fertility decline in Eastern Europe are incomplete because they fail to give due weight to the effect of population policies. Keywords: Eastern Europe; population policy; Romania; fertility decline; abortion; history Fertility decline in Europe is not new—it began back in the nineteenth century in several European countries. Scholars still debate the relative importance of economic development, cultural change, and increasing social interaction in motivating European couples to reduce their number of offspring. What we know for certain is that fertility decreased substantially and, during the twentieth century, fell well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, long considered by demographers as a kind of watershed event. The problem of falling fertility has been taken seriously by various governments, who have allocated important resources in an attempt to stop this trend. Notable among the successful countries were a few East European countries1 where fertility Cristina Bradatan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Central Florida. Her work examines the relationship between family relations in various social contexts (migration, poverty, political and economic transition). Current projects include a forthcoming article examining some nineteenthcentury theories of suicide and involvement into a large, collaborative project on Demographic and Social Change in Eastern Europe (http://www.k-state.edu/sasw/kpc/eedemo/). Glenn Firebaugh is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Demography and College of the Liberal Arts Research Professor at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of The New Geography of Global Income Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2003) and Seven Rules for Social Research (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). From 1997 to 1999 he was Editor of the American Sociological Review. Journal of Family History, Vol. 32 No. 2, April 2007 179-192 DOI: 10.1177/0363199006297732 © 2007 Sage Publications 179 Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 180 JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY / April 2007 remained above replacement level—at least until 1990. During the 1990s, however, the number of children born decreased in Eastern Europe, reaching one of the lowest fertility levels ever attained in the world. The turbulent history of Eastern Europe in the 1990s (change in political regimes, Yugoslavian war, Kosovo problem) drew a lot of attention from the media, and researchers generally followed suit. Thus it became customary, both in the media and in academic discussions, to describe Eastern Europe as a “region in transition” politically, economically, and socially. Among all the transformative events happening in the East part of the old continent, demographic changes—more silent, less-newsworthy phenomena—were described only by demographers, often with many new figures, but not many new explanations. The explanations generally evolved around the same ideas that dominated the discourse on Eastern Europe in the media: people change their demographic behavior (have fewer children, die younger, and some migrate outside of the region) because of the anomie that follows social and economic turbulence of the scale seen in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. While we do not dispute the claim that Eastern Europe has been a region in transition, in the case of fertility change we contend that the trends in the 1990s can also be seen as a continuation of historical trends of the 1960s, and not only as a change caused by the anomie and uncertainty people experience in tumultuous times. Although anomie and poverty no doubt contributed to the fertility decline in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, we believe the evidence suggests that concomitant changes in fertility policy were at least as critical for the 1990s decline in fertility. Using the case study of Romania, we show that population policy—defined as a macro level factor, a system of constraints and opportunities in which couples/individuals make decisions regarding when and how many children to have2—plays an important and often neglected role. Romania, where the pro-natalist policies were very strongly enforced during state socialism, is an extreme case, and the 1990 changes in the population policies brought an immediate decrease in fertility. Restricted access to abortion and to contraception before 1990, birth allowances, and low day-care fees were successful means in raising the fertility levels and keeping fertility from falling below replacement after 1966 (when they were introduced). However when these restrictions and incentives ceased to exist (in 1990), the fertility fell below replacement level. In this light—of changing population policies—the very low fertility recorded after 1990 is not a strange phenomenon but a predictable trend, disturbed by the pro-natalist policies enforced between 1960s and 1990s. DESCRIPTION OF PROBLEM It is generally accepted that modern populations followed the demographic transition pattern from high to low rates of fertility and mortality. When and at what limit the decrease in mortality will stop is one of the many unknown points about the demographic transition. Regarding fertility, some researchers hypothesized that replacement level is the lowest point that would be attained, and that fertility will remain more or less around that value. However, this was not the case and currently most of the European countries have persistent below-replacement fertility. Although the total fertility rate (TFR) values in Eastern Europe are not much smaller than the TFR values for Western Europe, what distinguishes them within Europe is a continuous decrease after 1990 (see Figure 1). Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 Bradatan, Firebaugh / HISTORY, POPULATION POLICIES, AND FERTILITY DECLINE 181 4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 1950-55 1955-60 1960-65 1965-70 1970-75 1975-80 1980-85 1985-90 1990-95 1995-00 Eastern Europe Western Europe Northern America Figure 1. Evolution of TFR between 1950-2000 in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and North America (US and Canada) Source: United Nations (www.un.org). While some researchers explain the decline of fertility in Eastern Europe as being partially misleading because TFR is biased by postponement,3 other researchers take the decline as real and offer more substantive explanations. There are three main classes of explanations. (1) Psychological: Some researchers focus on the “shock”4 or anomic situation5 following the change in the political and economic systems. (2) Economic: Others prefer an economic explanation, emphasizing the increasing poverty that characterized the region after 1990 as a major factor in decreasing fertility.6 (3) Cultural: A smaller, but increasing, group argues for a cultural explanation of this sudden decrease in fertility,7 a second demographic transition which affected Eastern Europe after 1990. In all these explanations, the decline in fertility is seen as a direct result of post-1990 political and social changes, and the pre- and post-1990 periods are often contrasted. Although the first explanation above—the idea of a relationship between income uncertainty (anomie) and low fertility—seems to make a lot of sense, there is little supporting evidence. Ranjan (1999), using a two-period stochastic model of fertility behavior, argues that it is economically rational for individuals to postpone childbearing during the times of economic uncertainty. He concludes that “the increase in uncertainty about future income…gives rise to a threshold behavior such that individuals above the threshold level of income want to have a child immediately, while those below the threshold wait for the uncertainty to be resolved.”8 Although Ranjan suggests that his results can be used to explain fertility decline in Eastern Europe after 1990, he does not explain how to reconcile his conclusions with the fact that poor people in Eastern Europe, who obviously are more exposed to income uncertainty, tend to have more children compared to people with higher income.9 A second explanation stresses the effect of rising poverty in Eastern Europe as a factor in explaining the fertility decline. In discussing fertility regulation in Bulgaria, Carlson and Omori10 note that the declining state socialist economy, followed by “rapidly changing socioeconomic conditions” after 1990, made more and more women use both contraception and abortion as methods for limiting their fertility. Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 182 JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY / April 2007 The second demographic transition theory is a third explanation. First advanced by Lesthanghe (1983) as an explanation for contemporary trends in fertility and marriage in Europe, the argument for a second demographic transition links declining fertility, declining rates of marriage, increasing cohabitation, and divorce to the ideational change that affects postmodern Europe. Desacralization of life and individualism make people less willing to raise a high number of children or to commit themselves to a lifetime union and, as a result, fertility and nuptiality rates decline. Initially developed at a macro level, this theory has received a fair amount of support in micro level tests as well. Studies reinforcing such an explanation focus on Central rather than on Southeastern Europe, and use similar arguments for these countries as were used for Western European countries.11 All the explanations presented above have one thing in common: they contrast two periods—pre- and post-1990—and look for a factor that would explain why fertility declined after 1990. However, the post-1990 decline in fertility is not a new phenomenon in the demographic history of Eastern Europe. As early as the 1960s several Eastern European countries recorded below replacement fertility (see Figure 2). Unlike Western Europe or the United States, Eastern Europe did not have a “baby boom” after World War II. In fact, fertility in Eastern Europe continued to fall especially in the 1950s, when many Eastern European countries adopted very liberal abortion laws (see Figure 2). Many of these countries reversed the fertility course in the 1960s by introducing pro-natalist policies. The policies apparently had their intended effect of arresting the fertility decline in Eastern Europe (though not completely in all countries). Put another way, without these policies we anticipate that fertility would have continued to decline. If that is the case, the post-1990 decline in fertility in Eastern Europe can be seen as the continuation of a historic decline that was interrupted by the pro-natalist policies of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. PRO-NATALIST POLICIES IN EASTERN EUROPE Fertility is both an individual and a societal problem12—societal, because the age distribution of a nation influences a country’s economic growth, pension, and healthcare system expenses, and individual, because the responsibility for giving birth and rearing children falls on individuals and families. Following Berelson (1974),13 there are two types of fertility policies: positive ones, using incentives, and negative ones, using constraints against people in order to attain a society’s desired level of fertility. Incentives can be money at birth, monthly allowances for families with children, maternity and paternity leaves, benefits for single mothers or mothers with many children. Limited accesses to contraceptive methods or abortion are the typical pronatalist constraints used by governments. The rationale behind the positive or negative policies differs. In the first case, the government defines the low fertility as a case of unmet need for children; people want to have more children, but they lack the financial means for rearing them. In the second case (negative policies), people are seen as selfish or incapable of perceiving the societal needs: they do not want to have more children, so they need to be forced to do so. The positive policies would be successful then only in those cases where there are, indeed, many people who want to have more children, but cannot afford them. The negative policies can be successful even if people do not want to have more children, if the government is able to enforce the policy strictly. Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 Bradatan, Firebaugh / HISTORY, POPULATION POLICIES, AND FERTILITY DECLINE 183 3.5 3 2.5 Bulgaria Slovak Republic Romania Poland 2 Hungary Czech Republic 1.5 1 0.5 0 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 1998 TFR during 1960-1998, Eastern European Countries Sources: U.S. Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/idbsprd). United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Gender Statistics Database (www.unece.org). Recent Demographic Developments in Europe, 1999. (Sometimes the TFR has different values in the three databases used here. The differences are not very large [usually less than 0.1]; as a rule, we used the same source of statistics for all countries in one year.) Figure 2. State socialist governments in Eastern Europe faced a dilemma in addressing the problem of low fertility in the 1960s. On one hand, the low fertility rate called for pro-natalist measures. On the other hand, Marxist ideology emphasizes the importance of raising women’s status in the family and society. This posed a dilemma because, as many studies have shown, increasing the status of women often leads to a decreasing level of fertility. Sometimes policies that are designed to do both—that is, elevate the status of women and encourage more births—are ineffective as pronatalist policy, as has happened in the case of providing affordable childcare programs. Although intended to be pro-natalist, government subsidies for childcare can have the opposite effect: with the availability of childcare centers, “women who want to work will have the opportunity to enter or reenter the labor force much sooner; and the rewards of employment may compete effectively with the satisfactions of additional children.”14 Many of the Eastern European countries employed positive pro-natalist policies before 1990, offering numerous incentives to have children. In Poland, a birth allowance began to be offered in 1970s in the amount of three times the monthly allowance for a child15 and in the 1980s a mother could ask for up to three years unpaid maternity leave.16 In Czechoslovakia, after 1945, a Family Allowances Act introduced state financial support for families with children, regardless of income17 and by the end of the 1970s, 4% of the Czech budget was spent on family cash benefits and 7% on services for families with children.18 In Bulgaria, birth and family allowances for the third child increased in 1960s. Several Eastern European countries also used coercive measures to raise national fertility. In Hungary, in 1953, several measures were adopted which restricted access to abortion and contraceptives19 and in 1970 stricter abortion regulations were introduced.20 In Bulgaria, by the end of 1960s, abortion restrictions were introduced for married women who were childless or had only one child. However, Romania had the strictest abortion laws, limiting legal access to abortion to a few well-defined Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 184 JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY / April 2007 medical situations for all women. Romania also blocked access to contraceptive methods. It is not surprising, then, that this country had one of the highest levels of fertility until 1989, and also the fastest decline in fertility immediately after 1989.21 The pro-natalist policies were partially successful, in the sense that they succeeded in keeping fertility from decreasing very rapidly, or, in some cases, produced a jump in fertility rates, as in Romania in 1967. After 1990, when many of the negative policies were relaxed and the level of incentives reduced, couples returned to the “normal” number of children, and fertility declined significantly in much of Eastern Europe in the decades of the 1990s (see Table 1). A CASE STUDY: ROMANIA Between 1966 and 1990, Romania had some of the most pro-natalist policies in the world, with contraceptive methods not being available and abortion prohibited (with the exception of a few medical situations). The policy was remarkably effective: fertility increased dramatically in 1967, the year after the law was adopted, and total fertility rate stayed above replacement level until 1990, when the law was abolished. As we will now try to demonstrate, absent those restrictive policies, fertility in Romania would have followed a very different trend leading to very low fertility levels well before 1990. Why such a restrictive law was adopted, how women adapted to the constraints posed by the law, and what fertility trends most likely would have been in the absence of the law is what we will discuss in this part of the article. Romania (or, better said, Romanian provinces) was a late runner in the demographic transition. As in other Balkan countries,22 fertility began to fall sharply after 1900, abortion being used extensively as a method for limiting the number of children (see Figure 3). By 1965, the number of abortions legally performed in Romania was above one million, with 3.6 abortions per one live birth.23 In the context of the eugenic movement in the first half of the twentieth century, dominated by the idea of a “healthy nation,” the high number of abortions began to be seen as a problem for the nation, a problem serious enough possibly to require regulation. Several articles were published in some of the most important newspapers (Adevarul, Universul) discussing, from an eugenic point of view, whether abortion should or should not be legalized and regulated by the state, taking into account that many women, especially from urban settings, use abortion to control their fertility.24 In 1936, an important public figure (Sabin Manuila) published an article discussing the state’s “concern” for the growth of the birth rate25 and, in the same year, the parliament adopted a law that criminalized abortion in all cases with the exception of those couples in which one or both parents were mentally ill.26 After 1945, when the Communist Party assumed power, such eugenic ideas disappeared from public discourse and, in 1948, the law concerning abortion was revised, although abortion remained a criminal activity.27 After Stalin’s death (in 1953) women’s rights as citizens equal with men received greater emphasis in all state socialist countries, and after 1955 many of these countries adopted very liberal abortion laws. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics liberalized abortion in 1955,28 Poland did so in 1956,29 Czechoslovakia in 1957,30 and Bulgaria in 1956.31 Following the trend, in September 1957, Romania adopted a new abortion law which made abortion legal (Decree number 463 for legalizing interruption of pregnancy, published in Buletinul Oficial nr.26/30, September 1957). At the same time, Romania began a period of important economic changes: fertile land became the Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 Table 1. Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for Selected East European Countries 1988 1.97 1.94 1.81 2.13 2.31 2.15 1.87 1.88 1.82 2.08 2.20 2.08 1.78 1.90 1.87 2.04 1.84 2.09 1.66 1.86 1.88 2.05 1.58 2.05 1.55 1.72 1.78 1.93 1.50 1.93 1.46 1.67 1.69 1.85 1.44 1.87 1.37 1.44 1.65 1.79 1.41 1.67 1.23 1.28 1.58 1.61 1.34 1.52 1.23 1.18 1.46 1.58 1.30 1.47 1.09 1.17 1.38 1.51 1.32 1.43 1985 1986 1987 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1.11 1.16 1.33 1.43 1.32 1.38 1999 1.30 1.13 1.26 1.39 1.32 1.32 2000 1.27 1.14 1.29 1.39 1.32 1.28 2001 1.24 1.14 1.28 1.37 1.33 1.28 2002 1.21 1.16 1.29 1.36 1.34 1.29 Bulgaria Czech Republic Hungary Poland Romania Slovak 1.98 1.96 1.85 2.33 2.31 2.26 2.02 1.94 1.84 2.22 2.40 2.20 1.97 1.91 1.82 2.15 2.39 2.15 Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 Source: U.S. census bureau (http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/idbsprd). United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Gender Statistics Database (www.unece.org). Recent Demographic Developments in Europe, 1999.(Sometimes the TFR has different values in the three databases used here. The differences are not very large [usually less than 0.1]; as a rule, we used the same source of statistics for all countries in one year.) 185 186 JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY / April 2007 50.0 45.0 40.0 35.0 30.0 25.0 20.0 15.0 10.0 5.0 0.0 1899 1902 1905 1908 1911 1914 1920 1923 1926 1929 1932 1935 1938 1947 1950 1953 1956 1959 1962 1965 1968 1971 1974 1977 1980 1983 1986 1989 1992 1995 1998 Figure 3. Birth Rate (Per 1,000 People), Romania, 1899-1998 Source: Romanian Yearbook, 1935-1936, Ghetzau (1997), Romanian Demographic Yearbook (2001). 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1930 1935 1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 Figure 4. Percentage of Urban Population, Romania, 1930-2000 Source: Romanian Demographic Yearbook, 2001. state’s property, the country urbanized (see Figure 4) and industrialized rapidly, and women’s education and labor force participation increased significantly. At the same time, between 1957 and 1966 fertility declined dramatically and, in 1966, TFR fell below replacement level. Communist authorities—concerned over the decline of fertility and especially its effects on the future workforce32—interpreted this trend as a direct result of legalizing abortion in 1957. The result was a new abortion law (770/1966) drastically limiting the access to abortion. Although contraception was not restricted through this law, the government ceased either to import or to produce any contraceptive devices. The contradiction between the law and the Marxist ideology, which emphasizes women’s rights as citizens, was easily solved through a media campaign: having children was defined as a duty to the nation, a healthy choice for women, a way to achieve happiness in life. Before 1966, for example, the first two pages of Scanteia Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 Bradatan, Firebaugh / HISTORY, POPULATION POLICIES, AND FERTILITY DECLINE 187 4.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 TFR Figure 5. Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Romania, 1956-2000 Source: Romanian Demographic Yearbook 2001. (the main newspaper of the Romanian Communist Party) typically were devoted to political and economic news: foreign authorities visiting Romania, Romanian authorities going abroad, new economic success of the Romanian Communist Party, etc. After July 1966, however, things changed, and the first two pages began to include articles about maternity as a woman’s duty to the nation. On August 4, 1966, Ursula Schiopu, a psychologist, argues that “feminine charm is regenerated by maternity.”33 Two weeks later, on August 17, there is a first-page article on schools and children,34 and on August 21 another article about “Children’s love.”35 In a September 19 article titled “Maternity’s advantages,” a physician argues that pregnancy heals acne, eczemas, depression, and melancholy.36 On September 23, women who ask for abortion are called “superficial” and legislation is blamed for letting them obtain abortions so easily,37 and the next day Zaharia Stancu, an important Romanian writer and member of the Romanian National Academy, describes past times when families had many children and all of them were happy.38 The next day an article titled “Maternity” presents various stories about abortions, concluding that “very few women ask for abortion because of objective reasons.”39 Finally, on October 2, 1966, the new decree (770/1966) called “Measures to regulate pregnancy interruption” was published on the first page. The decree, it was argued, was designed as a “way to help families with many children, to increase birth rate and to improve the care for mother and child.”40 The new decree stated that abortion was forbidden unless one of the following was true: pregnancy was a danger for woman’s life, one parent had a transmissible genetic disease, a woman was forty-five or older, she gave birth and has in her care four or more children, or the pregnancy is a result of incest or rape. For the next three months, Scanteia and some journals for women continued to publish numerous articles designed to educate the public about the virtues of having more children. Interestingly, as Bucur (2002) observed, Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 188 JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY / April 2007 “the language of this law [Decree 770/1 October 1966]…echoes that of the Carol II Penal Code [from 1938], which had been passed with eugenic concerns in mind.”41 It seems that the eugenics ideas, very popular at the beginning of the twentieth century in Romania, but totally repudiated by the communists as reminiscent of Nazi ideology, resurfaced with Decree 770. The new abortion law had a stunning effect on fertility in Romania (see Figure 5). The TFR almost doubled the next year and, until 1990 when the law was revised, it never fell under the replacement level. However, after the law was abolished in 1990, the TFR fell from 2.2 (1989) to 1.8 (1990), and there were estimated to be three abortions for every live birth in 1990.42 After 1990, fertility continued to fall and by 2001, the TFR was 1.3, one of the lowest in Europe. UNPACKING THE EFFECTS OF THE 1966 ABORTION LAW The effects of the 1966 abortion law were not uniform with respect to the ethnic, residential, and educational groups of the population. Some women were able to avoid the effects of the law, either by using illegal abortion, using contraceptives bought on the black market, or by bribing physicians to get a legal abortion. Fertility surveys, carried on large female national samples (over 10,000) and conducted by well-trained teams of researchers43 in 1967, 1974, and 1977 show, for example, that an increasing number of women claimed to be sick (thus unable to carry a pregnancy) or they used contraceptives (even though they were not available on the market). These surveys showed that women age forty and over living in rural areas had, on average, one more child than women of the same age living in urban areas. A similar difference was found between elementary- and college-educated women: women with elementary or less education had between 0.8-1.2 more children than college-educated women had. The results were consistent over the three surveys. When women were asked why they want two children or fewer, they stated that working and having children are difficult tasks to deal with at the same time and that life was easier with fewer children.44 As we will show in the following, one of the effects of this abortion law was a change in the ethnic composition of Romanians: Hungarians and Germans, minorities with a high level of education living mainly in urban areas, recorded a much lower increase in fertility after 1966 than the Rroma (Gypsy) population, leading to a decreasing percentage of Hungarians/Germans in the Romanian population and a higher percentage of Gypsies. In Romania, about 90% of the Romanian population is ethnically Romanian, 7% Hungarians, and 2.5 % Gypsy.45 The influence of the 1966 abortion law on the fertility and population composition of Romania can be assessed more directly using data from the 1966, 1977, 1992, and 2002 censuses, broken down by age groups. The data in Table 1 shows the number of children born by women during their reproductive life, until the age recorded at the census. These data are not period but cohort measures. The 1966 law against abortion had a remarkable influence on fertility in the short term, and changed fertility significantly in the long term. The TFR nearly doubled from 1966 to 1967, from 1.9 children per woman to 3.7 children per woman. The data show that for women under age forty fertility was higher in 1977 than in 1966—strong evidence of an effect of the 1966 abortion law (see Table 2). Likewise, cumulative fertility of women age twenty-five to thirty-four was higher in 1977 and 1992 than in 1966, showing again the effect of the 1966 law in raising fertility. Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 Bradatan, Firebaugh / HISTORY, POPULATION POLICIES, AND FERTILITY DECLINE 189 Table 2 Number of Children Born per 1000 Women during Their Reproductive Life, by Age Groups (Age Recorded at the Census) Age Group 15-19 20-24 25-29 30-34 35-39 40-44 45-49 1966 77.8 683.9 1329.7 1792.7 2159.1 2464.6 2728.2 1977 99.7 789 1671 2166 2315 2318 2296 1992 67 646.8 1513 1967 2140 2287 2343 2002 53.4 398.6 967.2 1431 1879 2105 2175 Source: Romanian Censuses, 1966, 1977, 1992, 2002. Bolded figures indicate fertility increases since 1966. Table 3 Cohort Fertility Rates from Simulation and from the 1977 and 1992 Censuses Cohort 1942-1946 1937-1941 1932-1936 1927-1931 1922-1926 Simulation 1.21 1.60 1.89 2.14 2.39 1977 1992 2.11 2.34 2.28 2.20 2.16 2.32 2.30 2.41 Source: Romanian censuses 1977, 1992, and authors’ computation. Bolded figures indicate lower fertility rates for the simulation. In order to evaluate the long term effects of the 1966 law, we projected cohort fertility rates for 1977 and 1992 assuming the 1966 parity-specific birth rates had remained constant over the next twenty-five years.46 That is, using data from the 1966 census on the number of children born to women age fifteen and over as of 1966, we used the 1966 parity-specific rates to project the 1977 and 1992 cohort fertility rates for cohorts born in 1922-194647 (those who were age twenty to forty-five in 1966). Table 3 compares the results of this simulation with the actual cohort fertility rates of these cohorts as given in the 1977 and 1992 censuses. Table 4 uses similar methods to project the percentage of women who are childless, by cohort. The results for both tables indicate that the 1966 law had a profound effect on the fertility of women born from 1932 to 1946 (women age twenty to thirty-four in 1966)—the effect is especially strong for women who were twenty to twenty-nine years old in 1966—while the law had little effect on women older than thirty-four in 1966. Indeed, as Table 2 shows, had the 1966 parity-specific fertility rates remained constant for the age groups, fertility would have been well below replacement level for women born from 1932 to 1946. This implies that, without the 1966 abortion law, fertility would have remained below the replacement level from 1967 to 1989. That is what we mean when we say that fertility tracked back down to its “normal” level in the years after the abortion law was changed in 1990. Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 190 JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY / April 2007 Table 4 Percentage of Childless Women Cohort 1942-1946 1937-1941 1932-1936 1927-1931 1922-1926 Simulation 26% 16% 14% 14% 16% 1977 1992 11% 12% 13% 16% 19% 10% 13% 16% Source: Romanian censuses 1977, 1992, and authors’ computations. Bolded figures indicate higher childless rates for the simulation. CONCLUSION Scholars still debate why fertility declined in Eastern Europe after 1990. With regard to that debate, it is important to note that the sharp decline in fertility in Romania after 1990 was not typical. Most East European countries exhibited a continuous and slow rather than a sudden change in fertility after 1990. For most East European countries, below replacement fertility was very much the case before the 1990s, and what happened in the 1990s was a continuation of what began in the early 1980s. Albania and Romania, on the other hand, were the only countries where contraceptives were unavailable and abortion strictly prohibited before 1990. In this article we argued that positive (family allowances) and negative (limited or no access to contraceptive methods and abortion, and family allowances) pro-natalist policies artificially increased Romania’s fertility levels before 1990, so the decrease in fertility after 1990 is not an anomaly, but a predictable trend, only disturbed between 1960s and 1980s. While in other Eastern European countries the decline in fertility after 1990 was slow, in Romania the number of children born decreased very sharply immediately after 1990, after the abortion regulations were changed and abortion became legal. Rather than denying the effect of the early 1990s upheaval on the fertility of Eastern Europe, what we mean to do in this article is to place the transition effects in historical context. Our argument is that transition explanations by themselves are incomplete because they do not give due weight to the effect of population policies. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This article is based on research done at the Population Research Institute (PRI), The Pennsylvania State University, which receives support from NIH, and at University of Central Florida. In gathering the data for this project, the first author received support from a Hewlett Foundation dissertation fellowship granted through the Population Research Institute (PRI), Pennsylvania State University. We thank Nancy Landale, Robert Schoen, Michael Bernhard, and Gordon De Jong for their encouragement and advice on this project. NOTES 1. In this article we include in “Eastern Europe” only Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland. 2. E. Fra ˛tczak and Michele Rivkin-Fish, “Low fertility and Social Policy: Comparing Poland and Russia” (paper presented at PAA, 2005). Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 Bradatan, Firebaugh / HISTORY, POPULATION POLICIES, AND FERTILITY DECLINE 191 3. Dimiter Philipov and Hans-Peter Kohler, “Tempo effects in the fertility decline in Eastern Europe: Evidence from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Russia,” European Journal of Population (2001). 4. Nicholas Eberstadt, “Demographic Shocks after Communism: Eastern Germany 19891993.” Population and Development Review 20, no.1 (1994): 137-152. 5. Priya Ranjan, “Fertility Behaviour under Income Uncertainty,” European Journal of Population 15 (1999): 25-43. 6. Elwood Carlson and Meguni Omori, “Fertility Regulations in a Declining State Socialist Economy: Bulgaria, 1976-1995,” International Family Planning Perspectives, 24, no.4 (1998): 184-7. 7. Tomáš Sobotka, Kryštof Zeman, and Vladimíra Kantorová. “Second Demographic Transition in the Czech Republic: Stages, Specific Features and Underlying Factors” (paper presented at the EURESCO Conference The Second Demographic Transition in Europe, Bad Herrenalb, Germany, 23-28, June 2001). 8. Ranjan, “Fertility Behaviour under Income Uncertainty,” 17. 9. Reproductive Health Survey, Romania (1999), 32. 10. Carlson and Omori, “Fertility Regulations,” 187. 11. See, for example, Ewa Fra˛tczak and Aneta Ptak-Chmielewska, “Fertility and Family Life Cycle Changes in Poland and the Second Demographic Transition” (EURESCO Conference The Second Demographic Transition in Europe, Bad Herrenalb, Germany, 23-28, June 2001) and Zeman Sobotka and Kantorová (2001). 12. Paul Demeny, “Pronatalist Policies in Low-Fertility Countries: Patterns, Performances, and Prospects,” Population and Development Review 12 (1986), Issue Supplement: Below Replacement Fertility in Industrial Societies: Causes, Consequences, Policies: 335-358. 13. Bernard Berelson, “An Evaluation of the Effects of Population Control Programs,” Studies in Family Planning 5, no.1 (1974): 2-12. 14. U.S. Commission, 1972a, 88; see also Demeny, 1986. 15. Ewa Fra ˛tczak, Margarete Kulik, and Marcin Malinowski, “Legal Regulations related to Demographic Events and Processes: Social Policy Pertaining to Children and Family—Poland, Selected years 1945-2003,” European Population Conference in Warsaw (Aug. 26-30, 2003): 15-19. 16. Anna Titkow, “Poland,” in From Abortion to Contraception: A Resource to Public Policies and Reproductive Behavior in Central and Eastern Europe from 1917 to the Present, eds. Henry P. David and Joanna Skilogianis (London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 165-190. 17. Vladimir Wynnyczuk and Radim Uzel, “Czech Republic and Slovak Republic,” in From Abortion to Contraception, eds. Henry P. David and Joanna Skilogianis (London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 91-120, 101. 18. Ibid., 102 19. David, Henry. 1999. “Hungary,” in From Abortion to Contraception, eds. Henry P. David and Joanna Skilogianis (London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 45-164, 147. 20. Béla Tomka, “Demographic Diversity and Convergence in Europe, 1918-1990: The Hungarian Case,” Demographic Research 6 (2002), http://www.demographic-research.org. Tomka, 2002, 11. 21. Among the state socialist countries, only Albania had a similar strict pro-natalist law. However, because of the limited data on Albania, we have not included this country in our study. TFR for Romania was 2.2 in 1989, and only Albania had a higher TFR than Romania, among the former state socialist countries. 22. Nikolai Botev, “Nuptiality in the Course of the Demographic Transition: The Experience of the Balkan Countries,” Population Studies 44 (1990): 107-26. 23. Lucia Roznatovschi and Mihaela Antal, Avortul spontan in Romania in anul 1992. studiu pe esantion [Spontaneous Abortion in Romania in 1992: A Sampling Study], Ministry of Health, Centre for Computations and Health Statistics (1993), 1. 24. M. Bucur, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 201. Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009 192 JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY / April 2007 25. Ibid, 204. 26. Ibid, 206. 27. Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1998), 47. 28. A. Avdeev, “The Extent of the Fertility Decline in Russia: Is the One-Child Family Here to Stay?” (paper presented at the IUSSP Seminar on International Perspectives on Low Fertility: Trends, theories and policies, Tokyo, 2001), 13. 29. Fra˛tczak et al., “Legal Regulations.” 30. Sobotka et al., “Second Demographic Transition,” 4. 31. Dmiter Vassiliev, “Bulgaria,” in From Abortion to Contraception, eds. Henry P. David and Joanna Skilogianis (London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 69-90. 32. M. Bucur, Eugenics, 227. 33. Scanteia, 4, 1966, 2. 34. Scanteia, August 17, 1966, 1. 35. Scanteia, August 21, 1966, 2. 36. Scanteia, 19, 1966, 2. 37. Scanteia, September 23, 1966, 2. 38. Scanteia, September 24, 1966, 1. 39. Scanteia, September 25, 1966, 1-2. 40. Scanteia, October 2, 1966, 1. 41. Bucur, Eugenics, 228. 42. Roznatovschi and Antal, “Spontaneous Abortion in Romania.” 43. Th. Ilea, P. Muresan, I. Ionescu, A. Pavel, M. Bilegan, and M. Teodorescu. “Cerceta ri ¸ ˘ medico-sociale asupra fertilita¸ii din R.S.România” [Socio-medical Studies of Fertility in R.S. ˘t Romania], Romanian Ministry of Health (1969). 44. Ibid. 45. Romanian Census, 2002. 46. We also assumed zero mortality for these women. Women with many children tend to have a low socioeconomic status, so they also have higher mortality rates. By assuming zero mortality, our simulated cohort fertility overestimated the values that would have been (because we keep all the women, while at the census the data are recorded only from those who are alive, and those with low socioeconomic status/high risk of mortality are underrepresented there). 47. Parity specific fertility rates were only available for five year age groups. We did not include the age group fifteen to nineteen in the computations because they were only forty to forty-four in 1992, so their fertility was not completed. Note also that, because the 1977 census was taken eleven years after the 1966 census, there is a one-year difference in the year of birth between the simulated cohorts and those recorded in 1977. We assumed that this difference did not play a major role in the results. The same is true for 1992 census, which is twenty-six years, instead of twenty-five years, later than the 1966 census. Downloaded from http://jfh.sagepub.com at TEXAS TECH UNIV LIBRARY on April 6, 2009