It worked: The birth rate exceeded the rate of deaths until Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in 1989. There was some level of circumvention in the 1970s and 1980s, but birth rates continued to outpace death rates up until the day Ceausescu was overthrown and Decree 770 was made null and void. (If you have a different definition of “work” than “it increased fertility”, please let me know what that definition is)
Mind you, as I said before, there were a lot of undesirable, shall we say, side effects because of this decree, but it did solve the fertility problem.
{Snark tag: Obviously, I do not endorse doing something as Orwellian as having a government like the Romania of the 1960s and 1970s, and the unwanted kids caused a huge amount of intergenerational trauma. To get back to the issue of fertility collapse, fertility collapse is an issue which will last only one generation: The people who have kids will have worldviews which encourage having more children}
No, very clearly in the graph in that link it only bumped the rate of births for about 3 years before it very clearly returned to it's previous trajectory.
It did not change the overall trend because radical anti-abortion measures like that do not change people's desire to have kids.
As one can see, births were at or above pre-decree levels after Decree 770 was passed, and only went below pre-decree levels when the decree was dismantled in 1989. The 1970s downward slope is much less steep than the 1960s pre-decree downward slope. In the 1980s, there was no downward slope whatsoever. Fertility stayed at roughly pre-decree levels before plummeting once the decree was ended. At no point while Decree 770 was in effect did we have a birthrate that “very clearly returned to it's [sic] previous trajectory”.
Now, let’s go back to what I was replying to when I brought up Decree 770. “Our birthrate has been below replacement” said one poster, and in a reply “You're assuming the birthrate can be "fixed"”. Decree 770 fixed the issue I was replying to: Birthrate being below replacement. Pre-decree, Romania’s birthrate was on a downward path, and would had been below death rates by the early 1970s. Because of the decree, the birth rate stayed above replacement rates until it was repealed in 1989.
Decree 770 increased fertility. It kept fertility above death rates. I have already posted elsewhere why Decree 770 was a very bad idea.
This will be my final reply to @mrguyorama. They do not come off as someone willing to admit when they are wrong about something.
I mention fertility rates remained constant in the 1980s. Now I know why fertility rates didn’t go down back in that era.
In the year 1984, Romania took a page from Orwell’s 1984: All medical units were put under surveillance to minimize the number of illegal abortions. There was now a secret “Thought Police” in 1984 monitoring all doctors and nurses to make sure no abortions slipped through the cracks. The number of abortion related convictions in 1986 doubled compared to 1985. Just like 1984, not only did a hidden thought police find these people doing illegal abortions, but people would report on their neighbors.
Romania was able to stop the 1970s fertility decline (which, again, was a good deal less steep than the fertility decline when abortions were legal) in the 1980s by going full Orwell and clamping down the screws.
It’s probably a bad prediction of the future, but having an exaggerated dystopian view of the future is a classic trick used in golden age science fiction (e.g. Decision at Doona from 1969 had a grossly overpopulated Earth) so one I was able to accept while reading the story.
It definitely has a bias; it doesn’t mention the stories of women regretting abortions at all, except (minor spoiler) mentioning that Asenath Smith didn’t want an abortion. As someone who has had multiple women confide their abortion stories to me, it’s quite common for women to deeply regret having them. I understand why a story as political as this one doesn’t want to get in to the nuance of the trauma abortion can cause, because it’s written in the same year Roe vs. Wade was overturn, so it’s a story of how much women need access to pregnancy tests and to abortion. [1]
[1] I personally believe in the right to an abortion, for the simple reason that, when a woman has a miscarriage or a baby which just isn’t viable, the medical treatment she gets should be a decision doctors make, not a decision people with guns and cages make.
Primarily, because : https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/