Romania Women Find That Scars From Years of Drudgery Are Slow to Heal

Romanian women, forced to suffer years of pain and drudgery under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, are finding that their physical and mental scars are slow to heal.

Two months after the revolution that toppled the dictator and his hated wife Elena, Bucharest’s shabby gynecological wards are overflowing with women mutilated by back street abortions that were the only alternative to unwanted pregnancies during his 24-year-rule.

Thousands more, desperate to avoid rearing children in the poverty that is Ceausescu’s legacy, are packed two-to-a-bed in now legalized abortion clinics.

“Trying to force a whole nation of women to bear unwanted pregnancies has had a huge effect,” said British gynecologist Tim Rutter, who heads a team of women’s health experts from the charity Marie Stopes International.

“It has affected relations between men and women. It has affected the way women see themselves. It has affected the way they see their work.

“It is unbelievable. I cannot believe any nation will ever be allowed to do this to its women again.”

Now that those who want abortions are free to have them, the sheer volume of women wishing to terminate their pregnancies means that the clinics that perform the operation, which can be extremely traumatic, have to function like impersonal factories.

At Bucharest’s Polizu clinic overworked doctors have performed some 6,000 abortions since January, with a daily average of about 100.

Patients lie two to a bed after their operations in bare rooms with peeling paint. Most rest only a couple of hours before being sent home.

“It’s very difficult. There are three senior doctors who do the abortions and that means that one man is doing 20 or 30 a day,” Dr. Ravasz Busenas said.

“One abortion takes about 15 to 20 minutes and after about 15 operations your hand gets tired and there are mistakes.”

Rutter and his team have been training Romanian doctors to carry out abortions using modern suction equipment, which is less painful than older scraping methods.

But so far there has been no chance to organize the sort of psychological counseling many women need to cope with the psychological trauma of abortion.

“In an ideal world you would do that first,” Rutter said.

“But you can’t hold your hands up in front of these hospital doors to 1,500 women a week in Bucharest and say they have to have counseling if there is no one to counsel them.

“And they will go and have terminations in the street if you don’t let them into the hospital.”

The next problem is to introduce birth control in a country where contraception was banned for nearly three decades.

Foreign medical teams have been handing out contraceptives to abortion patients in the hope that this will lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies.

However, in cash-strapped Romania, where foreign goods are often a source of income, they fear that the contraceptives will wind up on the black market.

“One year’s supply of the pill is worth two weeks’ wages,” Rutter said. “So if you give someone a packet, they’re probably going to sell it or share it out.”

While doctors and foreign aid workers struggle to clear up the backlog of medical problems inherited from Ceausescu’s regime, Romanian women are left with a host of psychological troubles to which there is no quick solution.

Chief among these is how to establish a sense of their own worth.

“There is still a mixed effect caused by exhaustion, disillusionment and artificial criteria in promotion,” said architect Mariana Celac, one of a handful of women in the country’s provisional Parliament.

“They carry out monotonous tasks with little satisfaction, if any, in conditions of chronic shortages of everything that could make life more bearable, which means food, medicines, not to mention clothes and cosmetics.”

A fledgling women’s movement, the National Provisional Council of Free Romanian Women, took over from the state-run Women’s Council during the revolution.

The new council, headed by singer Liliana Pagu, has campaigned to give women more free time than the current two days off work each month and to increase maternity leave from 112 days under Ceausescu to one year.

But they are finding problems getting women to join.

“For 20 years women here have had the impression they were being lied to,” Pagu said.

“In January, 1989, for example, our predecessors paid 200,000 lei ($10,000) just for a congratulatory gift sent to Elena Ceausescu.

“These funds came from subscriptions, and now women are entitled to ask: ‘Well if it happened before, what guarantee do we have that it won’t happen again?’ ”

Celac said she is not optimistic.

“There are major obstacles and prejudices both regarding the perception of the role of women by society and women’s perception of their own role,” she said.

“I think it will take a very long time to overcome these.”