Coercive Pronatalism Worked And Was Evil

People worried about it being evil continue to misrepresent whether it worked

In 1967 Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was worried about Romania. He was beginning to try to chart a course for his country more separate from the Soviet Union, flirting with some opening to the west, and had ambitious plans for the greatness of his country. In furtherance of those plans, he issued Decree 770, a policy which has become infamous as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in post-WWII Europe. What was Decree 770? It was a lot of things, and what it was changed over time, but at its root Decree 770 was coercive pronatalism: a plan to make Romanian women have more babies, no matter what. Some parts of it were unobjectionable: Romania increased child allowances and marriage bonuses and expanded a range of family supports! That’s all good! Some parts were things that are still debated today and people have divided views on: abortion was banned and contraception highly restricted. And some parts were uniformly evil: women were abducted for forcible cervical checks on a regular basis to check for pregnancy as a way of preventing illegal abortions, the state not only generated inadvertent orphancy but actually promoted and encouraged child abandonment in a mistaken belief that orphans raised in state orphanages would be ideal communist citizens, there was widespread police-sponsored rape.

When people say “Decree 770 was evil,” they do not generally mean “it’s evil to expand child allowances.” They always mean “It’s evil to have a program of basically state-sponsored rape and kidnapping.” And they sometimes mean “It’s evil to restrict abortion” or “It’s evil to restrict contraception.” For myself, I think the financial elements were largely good, the rape-and-kidnapping elements abominable and more than sufficient justification for murdering Ceaușescu as the orphans eventually did, the abortion element reasonable (I’m pro-life), but the contraception element bonkers and wrong.

The problem with discussing Decree 770 is the evil parts were so evil that 1) People really do insist on ignoring the actual policy details to figure out what happened (abortion and contraception were not actually banned for all women, for example) and 2) In a well-intentioned effort to prevent a second Decree 770 somewhere else scholars insist that the policy didn’t work.

What I am going to show today is:

1. Decree 770’s evil effects were exactly as evil as people say, in fact the truth is a whole lot worse than most people realize. What Ceaușescu did to Romanians was honestly even more appalling than the popular story of Romanian orphans might lead you to think.

2. However, Decree 770 did work. Romania’s fertility persistently increased by a large amount.

3. However, most likely what worked in Decree 770 wasn’t just the evil parts! The subsidies worked too, and we can see the subsidies still working today!

This teaches us several lessons:

1. Draconian abortion and contraception rules can indeed shift fertility by nontrivial amounts

2. And financial supports can too: and in fact very much already are!

I have argued these views for many years, but recently Tyler Cowen shared an article disagreeing with them. His disagreement was based on a recent paper by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso. I like everyone involved here! Tyler’s Emergent Ventures program was the seed money for the Pronatalism Initiative; Dean Spears is one of the only other “pronatalism-adjacent” people who is frequently at the PAA conference each year. All Friends Of The Substack. I encountered Spears and Geruso’s paper a little while back and meant to respond, but having Tyler share it lit a fire under my bum to get it done.

Unfortunately, while these are all Friends Of The Substack, they friends who are completely wrong, and wrong on a level that’s trivially easy to check. This kind of lightly informed casual analysis should not be considered publishable in high quality journals. In fact I’ll just register my view: I thought David Weil’s JEP paper in the same symposia was similarly unfit to print, as it didn’t actually model any of the relevant parameters; Gobbi/Hannusch/Rossi was interesting and I think I learned some things but somehow managed to write about polygyny without using the words “Islam” or “Muslim” and so I think really failed to seriously engage the question they were trying to answer; Pritchett’s paper was fine I guess. On the whole I felt this “symposia” was mostly sort of embarrassing. And look, I know JEP is a journal for big ideas not hard empirics— but it’s amazing just how poorly informed a lot of the big ideas JEP found among economists actually were.

Which brings us to Romania. Literally 100% of the analysis forming the basis for Tyler/Spears/Geruso’s view of Romania is this graph:

What’s wild about this graph is it uses the UNWPP data for TFR… but then just… doesn’t use it for CFR? They literally switched sources between graphs even though the first source has the data for the second graph. And then the comparison is Bulgaria— okay, maybe Bulgaria is a good comparison! But the intuition of a model like this is basically that it’s a quick-and-dirty synthetic control model, but SCM relies on using a range of donor countries. Below I won’t run formal SCM either, but will use an average of a wider range of countries. And finally, for cohort fertility, it’s really just inappropriate to treat Decree 770 has applying to “fixed cohorts.” Different cohorts were exposed to differential degrees to different elements of the policy. Below, I address all of these issues and show that, yes, Decree 770 really did raise fertility.

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What Decree 770 Did to Romanians

The story you will hear is Decree 770 banned abortion and contraception and sent the police to give women pregnancy exams. That last part is true, but the first two parts aren’t true. Contraception was rare before Decree 770, and Decree 770 banned import or manufacturing or sale, but it didn’t technically ban use. I know that sounds like a silly distinction, but if you’re a clever Soviet-era citizen trying to avoid a 4th kid, it matters if “mere use” is a crime. Abortion was absolutely not banned, though it was dramatically restricted. Here’s abortions in Romania 1950-present:

Decree 770 greatly reduced abortions but it was nowhere close to a total abortion ban. This is going to be important analytically below!

But Decree 770 and associated laws also changed other stuff. For example, considering both changes in taxation and benefits for kids, here’s how the net financial return from government policies for having a kid changed over time:

In 1967, the financial return to having a child vs. being childless rose from ~2% to ~7% of GDP per capita, and the return for 4 went way up, and there was further increase in 1977. Full policy details for this are buried at the end of this post.

In terms of cash grants and tax rate benefits, Romania today subsidizes four children at a similar rate as communist Romania subsidized one child.

But that’s not all Decree 770 did. It also did this:

Maternal mortality rates rose to WAY above peer countries.

Now, it should be said: most of this was not that actual maternity complications got worse. Most of this was because of botched illegal abortions for women who were ineligible for exceptions (again, scroll to bottom to learn more about exceptions! there were surprisingly many!). Here’s MMR excluding cases of botched abortions:

So Decree 770 led to a sharp rise in botched abortions.

What else did it do? Well, famously, it led to orphans.

You can see that the share of kids who were put in state care rose steadily after 1967 and peaked in the 1980s. Below, we’ll have an entire section on orphancy, and how the Romanian Orphan Crisis was manufactured, first by an evil dictator, then by credulous western nonprofits.

Orphan data isn’t great, but we can also look at child mortality data:

You can see right after Decree 770 there’s a blip up in child mortality, and again after 1985. We’ll come to “What happened in 1985” later. So kids died! Very bad!

So we’ve established that Decree 770:

1. Reduced but did not even close to eliminate abortions

2. Led to an increase in maternal mortality due to botched illegal abortions

3. Massive increased financial subsidies for fertility

4. Led to more orphans in absolute numbers and share of births

5. Led to temporary child mortality increases

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But what happened to fertility?

I’m dragging it out because isn’t it fun to have so much weird data about such a bizarre case study? C’mon, if you’re reading this blog, you love it.

Well, the standard “graph” for this topic uses the Total Fertility Rate, a measure of births per year. Here’s what that looks like, Romania vs. nearby countries:

In case you have a hard time spotting the obvious and very large fertility effect of Decree 770, here’s Romania - Average of Adjacent Countries:

As you can see, it’s not a mystery what happened with Romanian fertility: Decree 770 and related policies increased in dramatically, and, with an exception in the early 1980s when a balance of payments crisis blew up the entire Romanian economy, these policies kept fertility elevated for about 20 years. And if you’re asking, “Why is Romania so high in the 1930s?” well go one graph back up and notice Ukraine’s fertility. That’s what we call “the Holodomor” and it was genocide by filthy dirty ratbastard Russian communists against the Ukrainians. Romanian fertility declines at a similar rate in that period as Hungary and almost as fast as Bulgaria.

But if you’re smart, you see the problem! Period fertility is just that: a measure of births at that time. We want to know about cohort fertility.

And… we can measure that!

Here I have aligned cohorts by the year they turned 15. The gray bars at bottom are a very cool little indicator: for each cohort, I use published estimates of intrinsic fecundability (i.e. ability to conceive if you tried) to weight single-year-of-age policy exposures. A woman who was 43 in 1967 is exposed to Decree 770 in a very different way than a woman who is 16 in 1967. The gray bars capture that. They also reflect time-varying rules on eligibility for abortion, i.e. when rules on age shifted. They do not reflect exposure to financial subsidies (we will come to that). But this is a decent measure of “life course exposure to coercive pronatalism.”

You can see for the initial low-exposure cohorts, Romania had higher CFR than some countries (Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia), but lower than others (Moldova, Slovakia). For the peak-exposure cohorts, Romania has the highest CFR of any of these countries. Then as cohort-exposure falls, so does CFR.

Here’s Romanian cohort fertility vs. those countries, again taking the average of nearby countries as a counterfactual:

You can see it’s not an exact match… but that could be because of problems with fecundability weights or with policy exposure. Put another way: I can identify age-related treatment effects but for data limitation reasons parity-related treatment effects are harder. Many countries don’t have reliable partity-specific data I can use to create a counterfactual. But think through it: if abortions are allowed after age 45 or the 4th birth (and they were), a lot of older women who had 2 or 3 kids in the 1950s and early 1960s who thought they were done would probably have “restarted” fertility after 1967, because they lost access to their mode of control. If this is true, we should expect a considerable rise in like the 2→3 and 3→4 parities but maybe not 4→5, especially in the early years like 1967-1975.

And Romania publishes parity data, so we can look at that! Let’s keep a few things in mind:

1. 1977-1989, higher parity births got bigger cash subsidies

2. 1967-1989, there was a huge financial (tax) wedge at the 1st birth

3. 1967-1989, there was a huge financial (tax) wedge at the 4th birth

4. 1967-1985, there was 5th births and higher could be aborted

5. 1986-1989, 5th births could no longer be aborted

So ultimately, here’s how that shakes out:

If abortion rules drive the fertility outcomes we observe, there should be no major increase in 5th births before 1986.

But if cash drives fertility outcomes, we should see an increase in 5th births before 1986. So what do we actually see? Here it is in summary form:

You can see that from 1966 to 1970 (i.e. allowing time for full implementation), 1st birth rates only rose 4%. 1st birth rates were treated by both abortion and cash changes, so that suggests “Decree 770 just didn’t change 1st birth rates much,” which is plausible since 1st birth rates were already very high.

2nd and 3rd birth rates both were treated by abortion effects but only slightly treated by cash effects. They rose 54% and 165%. That suggests abortion may have had a big effect!

4th birth rates were treated by major cash and abortion effects, and rose 208%! Woah! If we assume that 4th birth vs. 3rd birth effects tell us about the effect of “much bigger cash benefit within same abortion context,” that suggests the cash benefits boosted 4th birth rates by about 40%.

5th birth rates were treated by moderate cash but no abortion effects. 5th births could still be aborted! Yet, they rose 53%, consistent with the notion that cash mattered.

If we look at 1976-1980, it’s a bit of a crapshoot, but yes, we do see that a considerable increase in financial incentives doesn’t seem to have increased parity-specific births.

But then 1983-1988, we see that removing abortion rights for 5th births was associated with a big fertility increase: but fertility also increased for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th births, all of which also saw bigger financial subsidies.

And amid all of this we happen to know from the 1975 World Fertility Survey that desired fertility in Romania was just 2.22!

So what does that tell us?

1. Draconian abortion and contraception restrictions do have effects in this case

2. But we also see very large effects in many cases where those restrictions were not the relevant treatment

3. Plausibly, financial incentives had a role to play as well

4. But when coercion slacked off, fertility fell despite incentives

5. But this was probably because Romanian TFR in the late 1970s was quite a bit higher than Romanians reported desiring: you can’t pay people to have kids they just don’t want.

6. Near the end of the regime, financial incentives seem to have played a role in the late-1980s rebound.

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But… was it really financial incentives?

Can we get at financial incentives another way? Yes we can! Just like we looked at cohort exposures to abortion rules, we can look at cohort exposures to subsidies! This is a bit of complicated exposure math but the basic intuition is: women are “more exposed” if they were at parities and ages where financial incentives applied to them, in years where those incentives were active, and at ages where women had higher ability to conceive children. So women exposed to a policy at age 49 are not much affected; but women exposed to big subsidies at age 27 would be very affected.

You can see financial incentive exposure has the same “too early” effect as abortion rules; plausibly for the same reasons, namely, financial incentives were biggest for higher-parity births (peak incentives kicked in at the 9th birth!), and older women would have been suddenly exposed, possibly creating a “throwback” effect across cohorts.

You can see abortion policy exposure is a better fit than financial policy exposure for the downslope. But… we’ll reflect on that more in a second.

But what’s interesting is how financial policy ends up predicting Romania’s recent recovery. Romania has closed the gap with peer countries on cohort fertility and is now trending above them, possibly because it is offering bigger subsidies on average. This is true even if I leave out any one of the comparison countries. In fact, Romania is still closing the gap if I leave out any two randomly selected comparison countries; I didn’t compare for any random 3, but the point is, this effect is not driven by idiosyncratic effects in comparison countries.

Put bluntly, it seems very plausible that Romania’s cohort fertility patterns really have been shaped by financial incentives.

But… why do financial incentives not predict the timing of the downslope as well?

My answer would be: insane chaos. Romania in the 1990s saw its currency lose 99% of its value due to hyperinflation. In 2005 they issued a totally new currency, worth 10,000x as much as the old currency to rebase the economy in a more rational way. While Romania’s post-communist transition was not as disruptive as some other nearby countries (Yugoslavia: civil war, Moldova: civil war, Czechoslovakia: partition), the end of communism was a system-breaking event everywhere. On-paper changes in financial benefits for kids didn’t matter much compared to the complete annihilation of the economic structure which had prevailed for generations. No birth subsidy will ever offset widespread massive unemployment.

And why was Romania’s decline more severe? Well, a mixture of reverse-tempo effects and fertility-specific morale effects.

1. Reverse tempo effects: Tempo effects refer to cases where period-specific birth rates rise because people pull future births forward. Current rates rise, but cohort fertility is unchanged. After the end of Decree 770, we can conceive of the pronatal regime as a “reverse tempo effect:” everybody who was ever going to have a 3rd child in Romania as of, say, 1994, had already done so under Decree 770. Decree 770 basically forced everybody to pull future births forward. If Decree 770 had lasted forever, the tempo effect would have become permanent, raising cohort fertility, as it did for the most-exposed women. But Decree 770 didn’t last forever, and so Romanian parity progression plummeted over night. Because Romanian fertility was farther above what women wanted than fertility in other nearby countries, Romania simply had further to fall.

2. Fertility-specific morale effects: Morale effects refer to the reality that sometimes fertility rises because of Generally Good Vibes, like postwar baby booms, and sometimes it falls because of Generally Bad Vibes, like much of eastern Europe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made them all realize their odds of dying in combat are waaaay higher than they’d previously thought. Morale effects are not usually specific to fertility: a whole society gets good or bad vibes. But sometimes, they are: and in Romania in the 1990s, fertility had crazy bad vibes. They hauled Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife out in an alley and shot him, and they abolished virtually the entire family subsidy system almost overnight. Decree 770 was arguably the central factor which caused the uniquely brutal end for Nicolae Ceaușescu vs. other Soviet rulers who got off easier. Disclosure: my view is Romania was well served by the execution and other post-Soviet countries would have been well served by executing more Soviet leaders as well. Regardless, the point is that in the wake of Decree 770, Romanians faced uniquely bad vibes for fertility.

These two forces together amount to saying “Decree 770 worked while it lasted, but didn’t once repealed.” Duh!

But the lesson to learn here is, “Pronatal policy is only successful as long as it remains in place, and it must remain in place for at least 20 and ideally 80 years to really work.”

Have we other evidence of this? Yes. France. Have we other cases of post-Soviet countries where plausibly exogenous changes in fertility subsidy caused major changes in cohort fertility? Yes. The breakup of Czechoslovakia (scroll to Figure 6).

So here’s where we land:

Neither abortion nor financial incentives fully explain the early rise of Romanian cohort fertility, but financial incentives do a better job explaining it, since we observe effects in groups unaffected by abortion policy.

Abortion outperforms financial incentives for explaining the pattern of Romania’s declining cohort fertility, but this may be due to simple confounding with the fall of communism and Romania’s uniquely bad “fertility morale” after Decree 770’s repeal.

Financial incentives pretty clearly predict ongoing changes in cohort fertility in Romania today, as well as in other nearby post-Soviet countries.

As a result, we can have pretty high confidence that financial incentives were a big part of “what worked” in Romania.

Past the paywall, I will give more details on how fertility changed in Romania by e.g. age and marital status, I give the best explainer you’ve ever read on WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH ROMANIAN ORPHANS, and I provide an exhaustive appendix on policy changes for family policy under the communist regime.

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Who Had Babies?