Emilian Isaila on Romania's crisis-resilient "decree children"

What the baby boomers were in the West the so-called "decree children" are in Romania. This epithet was given to the generation of children born between 1966 and 1990 as a result of Decree 770 passed in 1966 which banned all methods of contraception as well as abortion. Writing in the daily Adevărul, Emilian Isaila examines the resilience of Romania's decree children in times of crisis. "I belong to a generation that was born in crisis - a demographic crisis. I am a decree child that grew up and worked in the midst of crisis. If you ask me, the state of non-crisis is what I find strange. In all my life I have never known a time when the number of jobs available was greater than the demand for work, with the exception of the anomalous past three years. … What is happening now is dramatic. A crisis that hit out of the blue and is destroying our hard-won optimism. But there is a small but important difference between the crisis of the communist system and that of the capitalist system. The latter offers people an opportunity. And decree children don't need anything more than an opportunity. Communism gave them none. I belong to a generation that had nothing and gave nothing; that was forced to rely on itself to survive. People like me don't see the crisis as the end of the world but as the end of a world. And in most cases that simply means a new opportunity."

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