Romania’s communist regime (1947–1989) was marked by totalitarian control, pervasive surveillance, and political and ideological repression. Under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s leadership (1965–1989), the regime intensified into a dynastic dictatorship characterized by a cult of personality unparalleled in Eastern Europe, comparable only to North Korea’s Kim dynasty (Boia, 2016). It is widely recognized in the literature as the most repressive regime in the Eastern Bloc, weaponizing policies that controlled everyday life, including reproduction (Kligman, 1998). On the 1st of October 1966, Ceaușescu enacted the 770 Decree which criminalized abortion and contraception, mandating women under 45 to bear at least four children. The policy was introduced to reverse the country’s declining birth rate, which had fallen to 1.9 children per woman by 1966—the lowest in postwar Europe (Trebici, 1991). Despite evidence suggesting limited efficiency and high social costs, the regime justified the policy as a patriotic duty for securing the nation’s socialist future (Tismăneanu, 2006).

Thus, the Decree prohibited abortion except for limited cases: women over 45 years old or with four or more living children, pregnancies threatening the mother’s life or those caused by incest or rape, and cases of severe fetal abnormalities (Trebici, 1991). Even these exceptions required approval from state-appointed commissions, which often prioritized political loyalty over medical necessity (Betea, 2008). Women who underwent illegal abortions faced imprisonment for up to three years (Șerban, 2021; Bucur, 2008). By 1967, contraceptives such as condoms, IUDs, and contraceptive pills were removed from pharmacies (Barbulescu, Croitor and Onojescu, 2010). Married men could only purchase condoms with written spousal consent (Popa, 2006). Due to limited options, women sought out informal networks (Kligman, 1998; Betea, 2004).

Shortly after the Decree was enacted, income taxes increased on individuals without children regardless of marital status, starting from the age of 25. Financial incentives were also adopted, increasing children’s allowance and decreasing the income tax for families with three or more children by 30% (Cozma, 2012). Nonetheless, the 1980s marked the most repressive period. In 1984, women of reproductive age were subjected to mandatory quarterly pelvic exams in factories, and even in high schools to detect pregnancies (Doboș, 2010; Betea, 2004). Local authorities monitored compliance and absences led to wage deductions or public shaming (ibid.). Doctors, midwives, or individuals involved in performing or facilitating illegal abortions were sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison (Barbulescu, Croitor and Onojescu, 2010). In extreme cases meant to deter others, medical professionals who performed abortions were executed (Kligman, 1998).

Moreover, prosecutors and secret police (‘Securitate’) agents were present in maternity wards, closely monitoring procedures (Cozma, 2012). When women arrived at the hospital due to complications caused by attempted abortions, they were interrogated. Doctors were not allowed to treat them unless they disclosed information about the methods used and the individuals who performed the abortions. As many women refused to confess, they were denied medical care, often resulting in death (Doboș, 2010).

As such, women turned to clandestine procedures, which sometimes had horrific consequences, such as sepsis, uterine perforations, hemorrhaging, and organ failure, and death (Hord et al., 1991). Official figures state over 10,000 women died from unsafe abortions during the Decree’s 23-year enforcement (Kligman, 2000), although this does not consider unreported cases or deaths resulting from botched procedures (Şerban, 2021). During these years, 87% of all maternal deaths were caused by abortion and Romania consistently registered the highest maternal mortality rate in Europe (ibid.). In 1989, the number of maternal deaths peaked at 159 deaths per 100,000 live births, the highest rate recorded in Europe (Hord et. al., 1991). That year alone, 545 maternal deaths were linked to back-alley procedures (Kligman, 1998).

This paper seeks to answer the following questions: How does current alternative film and media construct women’s experience under the abortion ban from 1966 to 1989? How do present discourses interact with each other and with past experience? I argue the contemporary feminist discourse aims to disrupt both the communist past and contemporary patriarchal discourse engaging with past experience. I understand these patriarchal discourses as readaptations of each other, as patriarchy does not disappear; it transforms. Through memory work and visceral imagery, the feminist discourse memorializes women as victims and political dissidents and opposes sanitization and reappropriation of their experience and trauma. Although it disrupts patriarchal structures at the material level which pertains to the policy itself, it does not disrupt them at the symbolic level. The discourse invertedly recenters male voice at the expense of female subjectivity, allowing past oppressors to reframe themselves as victims. It further confines female characters within a patriarchal paradigm.

In Chapter II, I discuss literature on women’s reproductive rights in the region under communism, and specifically in Romania. Chapter III provides the theoretical framework and methodology for the discourse analysis in Chapter IV. Finally, Chapter V presents the conclusion.

CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW

Academic work has extensively analyzed the impact of communism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), particularly post-1989 transformations (Verdery, 1996; Rose, 2008; Törnquist-Plewa and Stala, 2011). Far less attention has been paid to how communist regimes shaped women’s lives, especially through reproductive policies and gender role constructions. This chapter explores how these dynamics evolved across CEE, focusing on Romania’s unique case.

Scholars agree women’s bodies and reproductive policies were central to the political apparatus of the socialist state (Einhorn, 1993; David, 1999; Alsop and Hockey, 2001). Mirroring the Soviet Union’s rhetoric and approach, CEE states initially legalized abortion during the mid-1950s, framing it part of women’s emancipation from capitalist patriarchal dependency (Githens and Mcbride Stetson, 1996; Stenvoll, 2002; Brunnbauer and Taylor, 2004). However, declining birth rates in the 1960s led to pronatalist shifts. Propaganda defined family as “society’s basic cell”, reconfiguring women as “socialist worker-mothers” (Einhorn, 1993; Bucur, 2008).

Back then, contraceptive methods were lacking across all states and abortion became the primary way of birth control (Einhorn, 1993; Stenvoll, 2002). IUDs and contraceptive pills became more accessible only in Hungary and East Germany from the 1970s onward (Zielinska, 1987). During the 1960s, the region adopted a pronatalist approach (David, 1999). Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, for instance, relied primarily on propaganda and material incentives—such as birth grants, paid maternity leave, family and childcare allowances, and taxation for families without children—to encourage higher birth rates (David, 1999; Brown, 2020; Randall, 2011). Although Bulgaria severely restricted abortion on request in 1968, it revised its policy in 1974 due to extreme public scrutiny (Brunnbauer and Taylor, 2004).

Romania, however, took the most repressive path by criminalizing abortion, eliminating access to contraceptive methods, and establishing systemic reproductive control for 23 years (Anton, 2018; Kligman, 1998; Bucur, 2008). It represents a critical case for understanding how the communist state’s use of reproductive policies and control over women’s bodies plays out when pushed to its most violent and invasive extreme. Studying how pronatalism evolved into a form of systemic violence further contributes to broader theoretical debates on biopolitics and reproductive autonomy.

The prevalent socio-economic and political literature regards the 770 Decree as an authoritarian intervention intended to engineer demographic growth and consolidate state power (David and Wright, 1971). It overwhelmingly conceptualizes its impact and consequences as institutional failures. Literature agrees the policy ultimately exacerbated poverty, increased the number of maternal deaths, led to around 100,000 orphans, and worsened inequality (Trebici, 1991; Bejenaru, 2010; Hord et al., 1991; Glasper, 2020). Through this perspective, maternal deaths are viewed as just another consequence that aggravated public health crises, trivializing their brutality. Furthermore, studies document individuals born because of the Decree have lower health and development outcomes, diminished labor market performance, and sometimes lifelong traumas (Dóczy, 2010; Pop-Eleches, 2006; Glasper, 2020). As this literature largely employs quantitative data and policy analysis, it desensitizes the female suffering endured by abstracting it into metrics of institutional success or failure. Therefore, it continues to frame women solely as instruments of demographic ambitions.

Although scholars critique the legislative processes and practices for prioritizing demographic goals over women’s autonomy, they focus more on political decision-making than foregrounding the impact on women’s lives (e.g., Popa, 2006; Doboş, 2010; Cozma, 2012). For instance, even when Pǎlǎșan (2009) critiques the state’s control over reproductive choices, the Decree is addressed within the broader framework of political repression. This perspective overlooks the specifically gendered violence of the policy, leading to conclusions that it “affected the sexual lives of all citizens” (Tismǎneanu, 2006, p. 510). Subsequently, it downplays the impact the Decree had on women. While this literature provides an essential structural analysis, it treats women as passive subjects within socio-economic and political discussions. It fails to explore the complex and gendered realities that underpinned everyday life under the Decree.

Feminist scholars focus, instead, on lived experiences, emphasizing gendered violence and trauma. Extensive scholarship states the state reconfigured women’s roles to support the policy. Kligman (1998) and Massino (2019) demonstrate the official discourse glorified motherhood, while focusing less on women’s roles as socialist workers. Although women were deemed emancipated, they were reduced to their reproductive function (Teampău, 2014; Oprea 2012). This dissonance extended to the private sphere, as despite the official discourse of emancipation, patriarchal norms prevailed (Miroiu, 2004, 2006).

Subsequent research explores the impact the Decree had on women. Forced pregnancies inflicted social suffering and shame (Andrei and Branda, 2015) which women internalized, viewing their own bodies as an ‘internal enemy’ (Betea, 2004, p. 251). The pervasive feeling of fear was transmitted onto following generations, creating a legacy of silence, trauma, and lack of sexual education (Anton, 2011, 2018). This continues to impact women’s contemporary choices regarding motherhood (Arsene, 2017).

Furthermore, this literature regards illegal abortions as political acts of dissidence through which women reclaimed their bodily autonomy (Kligman, 1998; Miroiu, 2004; Bucur, 2008). However, memory studies discussing how women who underwent clandestine procedures are represented in contemporary media reveal gaps. Scholars explore how literature (Marinescu, 2022; Prodan, 2021) and film (Adam and Mitroiu, 2016; Mitroiu, 2016; David, 2022) act as post-memory, transmitting traumatic history onto the next generations and how illegal abortions are represented in these pieces. These studies, nonetheless, do not critically assess whether the discursive construction of characters and narratives still reproduces patriarchal structures.

Although Haliliuc (2013) offers a notable exception by critiquing the patriarchal framing of post-communist memorialization of women, her study is not specifically concerned with the period under the Decree. Overall, the literature treats these representations in isolation, without examining how a broader and coherent feminist counter-discourse might emerge across multiple media forms and how it might interact with patriarchal narratives. Given the brutality of this past, it is imperative to better understand how the past is represented in the present.

Through this paper, I aim to address the identified gaps. I argue contemporary feminist counter-discourse memorializes women as victims and political dissidents, while visibilising the violence inscribed on their bodies. I argue it constructs a counter-memory to communist and contemporary patriarchal accounts, disrupting them at the embodied level, but reproducing their structures at the symbolic one.

CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY

Foucault (1972) defines discourse as “practices that systematically form the object of which they speak” (p. 49). Thus, power operates through discourse to construct ‘regimes of truth’ of what norms and assumptions become naturalized and how subjects are positioned within it (Foucault, 2014, p. 93). Discourse produces subjectivities by shaping social structures and individual subject positions. This process of subjectivation (ibid.), involves two interconnected dynamics: subjection (being governed by discourse) and subject formation (being intelligible within discourse). As Butler describes it, “subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency” (1997, p. 2). Therefore, we are shaped by discourse but can also find ways to act within and against it.

Power is also dispersed through institutional practices (Foucault, 1975). Foucault’s understanding of power as productive allows him to distinguish between different modalities of power and their subjects. While disciplinary power targets the individual through surveillance, biopower operates at a collective level, structuring features of life: birth, health and mortality (Foucault, 1978). The former produces self-regulating subjects who internalize the surveilling gaze, whereas the latter is exercised through institutions to shape and control populations.

Because discourse produces power relations, counter-discoursesemerge as sites of resistance. As Foucault states, “where there is power, there is resistance” (ibid., p. 95), which means that dominant structures contain the possibility of their own disruption. Counter-discourses challenge or reframe dominant meanings, which allows new understandings of subjecthood (ibid.). For Butler, this occurs through subversion, where one destabilizes dominant norms by reinventing and reinterpreting them in unexpected ways (Kolozova, 2021).

However, extensive emphasis on discursive resignification overlooks the material and structural forces that shape subjectivity (Boucher, 2006). Barad (2003) posits discourse and matter are co-constitutive. Through agential realism, Barad asserts subjectivity is not just inscribed onto passive bodies but emerges throughintra-actions—the ongoing interplay between the material and discursive.From this perspective, subversion does not only occur in the discursive but also in the material. Counter-discourses, thus, are also produced through bodies, objects, and spaces. In patriarchal discourse, the female body is marked as an abject—“what disturbs identity, system, order ” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4)—and must be expelled to uphold the symbolic order, the domain of structured meaning and social law. Blood, decay, and bodily fluids threaten this order by exposing the instability of the controlled subject. Thus, the female body and women are rendered unrepresentable. The monstrous feminine, as an extension of the abject, disrupts these boundaries and refuses containment, revealing the fragility of patriarchal structures (Creed, 1993).

Aligned with Hansen’s (2013) approach, this paper adopts an understanding of identity as discursively constituted through a process of linking and differentiation by articulating similarities to some elements and simultaneously defining itself in opposition to what it is not. This process​​ is central to the construction of the “self” in opposition to a series of “others”. As such, the discourse analysis in this paper identifies three “selves”—the contemporary feminist “self”, the communist patriarchal “self”, and the contemporary patriarchal “self”. It focuses primarily on the feminist “self”, while considering how patriarchal discourses construct women as “other”. Therefore, the feminist discourse and the female subject constructed within are my main objects of analysis. Through feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (FPDA), we understand how the “other” actively constructs and represents itself—in this case, through memory work. As an “active practice of remembering” rejecting a singular truth, memory work allows reclaiming the abject body and creating alternative representations of female subjectivity (Kuhn, 2000, p. 186; Hirsch and Smith, 2002). Thus, collective memory, as the “juncture where the individual and the social come together” (Hirsch and Smith, 2002, p. 7), becomes a lieu de dispute (Milani and Richardson, 2023), where counter-memories emerge as forms of resistance to the dominant discourse (Foucault, 1977).

Unlike Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which focuses on power asymmetries within a discourse, FPDA emphasizes the multiplicity of discursive positions and that identities move between dominant and resistant discourses rather than being fixed within a single power structure (Baxter, 2003). I deconstruct and interpret materials of memory work foregrounding female subjectivity by analysing how they dislodge patriarchal structures in a bottom-up process, while also “tracing the unreliable fragments” (Gannon, 2008, p. 46; Baxter, 2003). I study how the construction of the “other” might, at times, align with how the patriarchal “selves” produce it, while also resisting them. This intertextuality underscores how the female subject negotiates its agency and resistance within and against patriarchal narratives. As such, we understand how women are intelligible within discourses and how their lived experience and trauma under the Decree is represented or obscured.

Data

Drawing on Hansen’s (2013) methodological approach to discourse analysis, I identify the relevant temporal perspective and key events that inform my data collection. The primary timeframe period is from 2007 to 2021, to which I contrast the comparative period from 1966 to 1989. The key events I consider are the 770 Decree signed in 1966, the Revolution of 1989 after which abortion was legalized, and Romania’s accession to the European Union in 2007. The latter triggered a process that reconfigured and ‘Europeanized’ Romania’s national identity (Puscas, 2006, p. 82). Given EU’s requirements and pressure from civil society, the issue of gender emerged, to some extent, in the public political discourse following Romania’s accession (Miroiu, 2010). This primary timeframe allows for an analysis of how the contemporary patriarchal and feminist discourses have developed within a European context, where the issue of gender is more visible. The comparative timeframe, on the other hand, refers to the period under the abortion ban and supports analysis of the communist patriarchal discourse contingent on it.

According to feminist post-structuralist thought, I turn to collective biography as a feminist methodology because it foregrounds female subjectivity, enabling an inquiry into experiences that are difficult to articulate, such as trauma (Gonnick and Gannon, 2015). I identify testimony-based accounts as a primary source of data. Both non-fiction and fictionalized testimonies provide counter-memories because the individualized narrative challenges hegemonic historical accounts (Hirsch and Smith, 2002). For non-fictional testimony-based materials, I consider the independent journalistic project The Decree Chronicles (2019 – present) and the short documentary episode “Adevǎruri despre Trecut: Copiii Patriei” [“Truths about the Past: The Nation’s Children”] (2015) produced by the Romanian National Television (TVR). The Decree Chronicles collects testimonies, carries out interviews, and publishes articles on its website on how the consequences and impact of the Decree are felt today. It has garnered attention primarily through Facebook, with 4.7k followers and around 129k views for video recorded testimonials. Meanwhile, “The Nation’s Children” is televised yearly on the TVR channel as part of the documentary series “Truth about the Past”. The episode has recorded 60k views and 185 comments on Youtube (TVR, 2017). Both projects, thus, occupy significant places within the public discourse.

Regarding fictionalized testimony, I consider the book Si se auzeau greierii [And crickets could be heard] by Corina Sabau (2019) and the film 4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile [4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days] by Cristian Mungiu (2007). Sabau’s book has been discussed in popular newspapers, such as Adevarul, which is one of the biggest publication trusts in Romania (mediaTRUST, 2023). It has also been discussed in established cultural publications, such as Dilemaveche (Chivu, 2020), Observator Cultural (2021), and Scena9 (Iovǎnel, 2020). Mungiu’s film was the most viewed Romanian film in 2007, reaching more than $270,000 at the Romanian Box Office (Box Office Mojo, n.d.). As such, both pieces are........

© E-International