God, this article was full of lines that just made me want to cry.

This past Christmas Day was the 30th anniversary of the public execution by firing squad of Romania’s last Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who’d ruled for 24 years. In 1990, the outside world discovered his network of “child gulags,” in which an estimated 170,000 abandoned infants, children, and teens were being raised. Believing that a larger population would beef up Romania’s economy, Ceaușescu had curtailed contraception and abortion, imposed tax penalties on people who were childless, and celebrated as “heroine mothers” women who gave birth to 10 or more. Parents who couldn’t possibly handle another baby might call their new arrival “Ceauşescu’s child,” as in “Let him raise it.”

To house a generation of unwanted or unaffordable children, Ceauşescu ordered the construction or conversion of hundreds of structures around the country. Signs displayed the slogan: the state can take better care of your child than you can.

At age 3, abandoned children were sorted. Future workers would get clothes, shoes, food, and some schooling in Case de copii—“children’s homes”—while “deficient” children wouldn’t get much of anything in their Cămine Spitale. The Soviet “science of defectology” viewed disabilities in infants as intrinsic and uncurable. Even children with treatable issues—perhaps they were cross-eyed or anemic, or had a cleft lip—were classified as “unsalvageable.”

  • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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    5 months ago

    Oh, it gets better. The Romanian government couldn’t feed all the orphans because his dumbass tried to turn a bread basket with significant oil reserves into an industrial powerhouse (so he could have more guns), burning a lot of the oil that the economy relied on to pay for services to do it, so he came up with the bright idea of just giving them micro blood transfusions.

    Of untested blood. With often unsterilized needles. Up to 120 times in a month.

    During the AIDs epidemic.

    They kind of mention this but the author didn’t seem to realize it was actually supposed to be a replacement for food instead of a medical procedure.