Pro-natalism ends up being pro-deathism

Remembering Nicolae Ceausescu's Decree 770 in Romania

Romanian orphannage in 1990

I wrote my PhD dissertation on Romania and East Germany (published 1990), and actually took a year of Romanian at Harvard so I could read it for my research (it was a rare school to teach it and only because of one lecturer, Margaret Beissinger — now at Princeton).

Thus, I have this strange personal fixation on the country and its longtime megalomaniac of a leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, who was summarily executed with his equally nasty wife during the revolution there at the end of the Cold War.

Ceausescus’ death by firing squad in December 1989