From time to time, we see stories on the abandoned babies of Romania, who sadly provide a stark and disturbing natural laboratory for the study of early childhood development. But I'd lost track of where that research was headed, or whether it was still going on.
Virginia Hughes provides an update, with an intelligent discussion of the tricky ethical issues involved, in a piece of long-form journalism in a 6,000-word story in aeon, a London-based web magazine launched last September.
Hughes not only dissects the science and the ethics; she helps us to feel the desperation of these children, who began to be abandoned at high rates more than 40 years ago, as a consequence of a callous and cold-blooded government plan to create citizens entirely dependent upon the state:
A boy in a red T-shirt and sweats skipped up to me, grabbed my hand, and wouldn’t let go. His head didn’t reach my shoulders, so I figured he was eight or nine years old. He was 13… The boy kept looking up at me with an open, sweet face, but I found it difficult to return his gaze. Like most of the other kids, he had crossed eyes — strabismus, the professor would explain later, a common symptom of children raised in institutions, possibly because as infants they had nothing to focus their eyes on.
The deliberate creation of orphans was a product of the totalitarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator who assumed power in 1965.
It is a very sad story.
-Paul Raeburn
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