food short-   ages brought on by her husbands mismanagement. She had her own children bugged to ensure their loyalty. Ceau¸sescus ban on abortion was designed to achieve one of his major aims: to rapidly strengthen Romania by boosting its popula- tion. Until 1966, Romania had had one of the most liberal abortion policies in the world. Abortion was in fact the main form of birth control, with four abortions for every live birth. Now, virtually overnight, abortion was forbidden. The only exemptions were moth- ers who already had four children or women with significant standing in the Communist Party. At the same time, all contraception and sex education were banned. Government agents sardonically known as the Menstrual Police regularly rounded up women in their work- places to administer pregnancy tests. If a woman repeatedly failed to conceive, she was forced to pay a steep "celibacy tax." Ceau¸sescus incentives produced the desired effect. Within one year of the abortion ban, the Romanian birth rate had doubled. These babies were born into a country where, unless you belonged to the Ceau¸sescu clan or the Communist elite, life was miserable. But these children would turn out to have particularly miserable lives. Com- pared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of chil- dren born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way: they would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would also prove much more likely to be- come criminals. The abortion ban stayed in effect until Ceau¸sescu finally lost his grip on Romania. On December 16, 1989, thousands of people took to the streets of Timisoara to protest his corrosive regime. Many of the protestors were teenagers and college students. The police killed dozens of them. One of the opposition leaders, a forty-one-year-old professor, later said it was his thirteen-year-old daughter who insisted he attend the protest, despite his fear. "What is most interesting is that