The politics of duplicity : controlling reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania /

This is required reading for anyone who doubts the connection between reproductive freedom and women's status in society. In an effort to force population growth and thereby strengthen the socialist state, Nicolae Ceaucescu led Romania to adopt and enforce a series of pronatalist policies, the linchpin of which was the 1966 banning of abortion. In this ethnography, Kligman (Univ. of California at Los Angeles) examines the evolution, implementation, and consequences of this state strategy, which inspired Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. While both works are cautionary tales about usurping women's bodies for a higher good, this account is all the more chilling because it is nonfiction. Drawing on empirical data, laws and decrees, public announcements, media coverage, and extensive interviews with physicians and women, Kligman documents what occurred in Romania when political ideology clashed with lived experiences: the reemergence of illegal and unsafe abortions, a rise in maternal and infant mortality rates, an infant AIDS epidemic, compromised health care, strained marriages, abandoned children, ruined lives--and ultimately, the violent end of the regime. Highly recommended for all college collections. S. Behuniak; Le Moyne College