When Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, Romania saw the proliferation of leagăne—literally, “cradles,” otherwise known as institutional homes for the very young.
Ceaușescu wanted to increase Romania’s industrial output, and he thought that that required a larger population. In 1966, he enacted Decree 770, which restricted contraceptives, banned almost all abortions for women who hadn’t had at least four children, and instituted a thirty-per-cent income tax on childless men and women who were over the age of twenty-five.
The result was one of the saddest natural experiments in modern psychology. Thousands of children, from birth to the age of three, grew up neglected in understaffed institutions, often experiencing severe sensory deprivation in their formative months.
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