Ceau¸sescu gave a speech in Bucharest before one hundred thousand people. Again the young people were out in force. They shouted down Ceau¸sescu with cries of "Timisoara!" and "Down with the murderers!" His time had come. He and Elena tried to escape the country with $1 billion, but they were captured, given a crude trial, and, on Christmas Day, executed by firing squad. Of all the Communist leaders deposed in the years bracketing the collapse of the Soviet Union, only Nicolae Ceau¸sescu met a violent death. It should not be overlooked that his demise was precipitated in large measure by the youth of Romania-a great number of whom, were it not for his abortion ban, would never have been born at all.       The story of abortion in Romania might seem an odd way to begin telling the story of American crime in the 1990s. But its not. In one important way, the Romanian abortion story is a reverse image of the American crime story. The point of overlap was on that Christmas Day of 1989, when Nicolae Ceau¸sescu learned the hard way-with a bullet to the head-that his abortion ban had much deeper implica- tions than he knew. On that day, crime was just about at its peak in the United States. In the previous fifteen years, violent crime had risen 80 percent. It was crime that led the nightly news and the national conversation. When the crime rate began falling in the early 1990s, it did so with such speed and suddenness that it surprised everyone. It took some experts many years to even recognize that crime was falling, so confi- dent had they been of its continuing rise. Long after crime had peaked, in fact, some of them continued to predict ever darker sce- narios. But the evidence was irrefutable: the long and brutal spike in   crime was moving in the opposite direction, and it wouldnt stop until the crime rate had fallen back to the levels of forty years earlier.