Great Performance !

The abortion ban stayed in effect until Ceaus¸escu finally lost his grip on Romania. On December 16, 1989, thousands of people took to the streets of Timisoara to protest his corrosive regime. Many of the protestors were teenagers and college students. The police killed dozens of them. One of the opposition leaders, a forty-one-year-old professor, later said it was his thirteen-year-old daughter who insisted he attend the protest, despite his fear. “What is most interesting is that we learned not to be afraid from our children,” he said. “Most were aged thirteen to twenty.” A few days after the massacre in Timisoara, Ceaus¸escu gave a speech in Bucharest before one hundred thousand people. Again the young people were out in force. They shouted down Ceaus¸escu with cries of “Timisoara!” and “Down with the murderers!” His time had come. He and Elena tried to escape the country with $1 billion, but they were captured, given a crude trial, and, on Christmas Day, executed by firing squad.

Of all the Communist leaders deposed in the years bracketing the collapse of the Soviet Union, only Nicolae Ceaus¸escu met a violent death. It should not be overlooked that his demise was precipitated in large measure by the youth of Romania—a great number of whom, were it not for his abortion ban, would never have been born at all.

The story of abortion in Romania might seem an odd way to begin telling the story of American crime in the 1990s. But it’s not. In one important way, the Romanian abortion story is a reverse image of the American crime story. The point of overlap was on that Christmas Day of 1989, when Nicolae Ceaus¸escu learned the hard way—with a bullet to the head—that his abortion ban had much deeper implications than he knew.

Taken From : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything