The decree
Before 1966, abortion was, for most Romanians, the main method of birth control: modern contraceptives were hard to find, and sex education was close to nonexistent. Decree 770, signed by Nicolae Ceaușescu on 1 October 1966, removed abortion from the table almost entirely, with narrow exceptions — among them, being over forty-five or already raising four children.
The effect showed up almost overnight. Births jumped from 273,678 in 1966 to 527,764 in 1967 — a 93% increase in a single year, the sharpest rise in the entire available series, which starts in 1960. The following year, the birth rate held nearly as high, at 526,091. Only from 1969 did it start easing back toward pre-decree levels — though never all the way.
Drag through the years, from 1968 to 2025, and watch the golden bar: the generation born in 1967, climbing one row a year through the country's age structure. The bar just above it is the generation born one year earlier, in 1966.
In 2025, the 1967 generation was 57 years old and counted 349,780 people — 85% more than the generation born in 1966, right next to it.
A generation that endures
The 1967 generation first appears in population records in 1968, as infants, 588,909 strong. Five and a half decades later, on 1 January 2025, only 349,780 remained — a decline of over 40%, driven by both mortality and emigration. The generation reached young adulthood exactly during Romania's biggest waves of departure: the exodus after 1990, and later the decade following EU accession in 2007.
Even so, the generation remains 85% larger than the one born just a year earlier, in 1966, which counted only 189,463 people on the same date. The gap the decree opened in a single year, 1967, has not closed even after nearly six decades.
The 1967 generation is now approaching the end of its working life — most of them are already past fifty-five. Over the coming decade, the same people who disproportionately filled the country's maternity wards in 1967 will just as abruptly fill its pension rolls. The wave that entered the system sixty years ago, through a single piece of legislation, is about to leave it the same way.
Birth figures come from Eurostat's demo_gind series for Romania (1960–2026); population by age and sex comes from the demo_pjan series (1968–2025, the first year Eurostat publishes each single age separately). The pyramid shows resident population on 1 January of each year; the birth year shown for the highlighted bar is the most likely one, calculated from completed age.