30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact

Here’s what’s become of them.

Story by Melissa Fay Greene

For his first three years of life, Izidor lived at the hospital.  The dark-eyed, black-haired boy, born June 20, 1980, had been abandoned when he was a few weeks old. The reason was obvious to anyone who bothered to look: His right leg was a bit deformed. After a bout of illness (probably polio), he had been tossed into a sea of abandoned infants in the Socialist Republic of Romania.

In films of the period documenting orphan care, you see nurses like assembly-line workers swaddling newborns out of a seemingly endless supply; with muscled arms and casual indifference, they sling each one onto a square of cloth, expertly knot it into a tidy package, and stick it at the end of a row of silent, worried-looking papooses. The women don’t coo or sing to the babies. You see the small faces trying to fathom what’s happening as their heads whip by during the wrapping maneuvers...............

Izidor was destined to spend the rest of his childhood in this building, to exit the gates only at 18, at which time, if he were thoroughly incapacitated, he’d be transferred to a home for old men; if he turned out to be minimally functional, he’d be evicted to make his way on the streets. Odds were high that he wouldn’t survive that long, that the boy with the shriveled leg would die in childhood, malnourished, shivering, unloved................

“I walked into an institution in Bucharest one afternoon, and there was a small child standing there sobbing,” recalls Charles A. Nelson III, a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. “He was heartbroken and had wet his pants. I asked, ‘What’s going on with that child?’ A worker said, ‘Well, his mother abandoned him this morning and he’s been like that all day.’ That was it. No one comforted the little boy or picked him up. That was my introduction.”.............To Read More....

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Art Moore

Art Moore entered the media world as a public relations assistant for the Seattle Mariners and a correspondent covering pro and college sports for Associated Press Radio. He reported for a Chicago-area daily newspaper and was senior news writer for Christianity Today magazine and an editor for Worldwide Newsroom before joining WND shortly after 9/11. He earned a master's degree in communications from Wheaton College.

Just as the former Soviet bloc’s highest-ranking defector is being officially commended by the government of his native land for aiding the downfall of communism in the region, defenders of the old regime are threatening to bring him before the International Criminal Court of Justice in The Hague on crimes against humanity.

As WND reported, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the U.S. in 1978 after serving as Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu’s top official, was praised by the current Romanian government in an Aug. 16 letter and invited to visit the country as an honored guest. The government wants him to enlighten a new generation in Romania about the tyranny of the communist era in response to revisionists attempting to rehabilitate the Ceausescu regime…….Read more at