The experience of Romania in the 1960s and 1970s provides a dramatic example of how fertility is affected by changes in the cost of averting births. During the first half of the 1960s the Romanian fertility rate was only about 60 per thousand women ages 15 -44, and reached a low of 56 per thousand in 1966. The Romanian authorities became alarmed because the rate was far below that which would sustain a stationary population in the long run (about 70 per thousand). Inasmuch as a high abortion rate seemed to be contributing to the low fertility, they suddenly made abortion illegal.
The immediate effect was astounding. In 1967 the fertility rate almost doubled, to 106 per thousand. In subsequent years, how-ever, the rate began to fall as other ways of averting births were implemented, Within a relatively few years the fertility rate moved back to the 70 – 80 range – still higher than it had been when legal abortion was freely available. Raising the “price” of averting births did have a long-run effect on fertility. That it was the abortion ban which made the difference is substantiated by the fact that fertility in the U.S.S.R., where no such change in abortion occurred, showed relative stability during the very period in which the Romanian rate was undergoing drastic change.