Fertility effects of the abolition of legal abortion in Romania

Abstract There is much interest to-day in governmental actions and regulations designed to have an effect on fertility. Widespread concern with the implications of population growth has led to unprecedented attention to the design and implementation of governmental policies intended to affect fertility. Unfortunately, there is very little empirical evidence of the effect of governmental action, largely because of the difficulty of interpreting the causal relations between changes in laws or programmes on the one hand, and fertility trends on the other. For this reason, the drastic alteration of the fertility laws in Romania in 1966 is of special interest in that it provides something approaching an experimental context for examining the effect of a legal code on fertility.