In 1957, along with many countries in Eastern Europe, Romania liberalised its abortion law. The Soviet model of birth control made surgical abortion easily available, but put restrictions on access to modern contraceptives, leading to an exceptionally high abortion rate. By the mid-1960s there were 1 100 000 abortions performed each year in Romania, a lifetime average of 3.9 per woman, the highest number ever recorded. In October 1966, 1 year after coming to power, in an attempt to boost fertility, Romania's communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu made abortion broadly illegal, permitting the procedure legally only under a narrow range of circumstances: for women with four or more children, over the age of 45 years, in circumstances where the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest or threatened the life of the women, or in the case of congenital defect.
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