Buoyed by dollars and evangelical zeal, a growing number of ‘pregnancy crisis centres’ threaten to return the country to the deadly days of Ceaușescu’s ban
t was the middle of summer, and the smell of ripening mirabelle plums filled the streets of Bucharest. Irina Mateescu was almost 18 and living with her grandparents. She had good grades, a boyfriend, and a late period which she was trying not think about.
What she did not realise at the time was that the leaflet she was given offering support was actually advertising the services of a religious “pregnancy crisis centre”. Abortion was legalised soon after Ceaușescu’s execution in 1989. Until 2003, the rate of abortions exceeded the rate of births, in part because education in family planning remained poor in many parts of the country after the decades-long ban, and the medical infrastructure to deliver contraceptives had to be built from scratch.
“I asked a hospital in [the eastern city of] Iași where their family planning office is,” Mateescu says. “I was told it was at the church in the courtyard [in Romania many hospitals have Eastern Orthodox churches attached to them]. In the church, it said: ‘family planning and pregnancy crisis centre’; everyone was sent there to speak to the priest.”Photograph: Andreea Câmpeanu/The Guardian“In the 1990s, most of the population was pro-choice due to the national trauma of the abortion ban.
The city’s social services continue to refer women with unplanned pregnancies to the centre. Puls also delivers abstinence-only “purity programmes” in technical colleges in Oradea. “I was called by God,” says Cristea, who emigrated from Yugoslavia to the US in 1984 and subsequently began following Baptist teaching. “During prayer, God gave me a vision of heaven, and everywhere there were children running towards me saying ‘also me’ in Romanian. Later I realised these will be the children saved from abortion.”