# Has any country that banned abortion ever given women equal rights? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 17, 2016, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-any-country-that-banned-abortion-ever-given-women-equal-rights/766159 "2016-09-17T14:55:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [September 20, 2016, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-any-country-that-banned-abortion-ever-given-women-equal-rights/766159/41 "2016-09-20T20:39:19Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Officially, yes. Gender equality is a common principle for communist regimes so Kim Il Sung outlawed any form of gender discrimination way back in the forties. The current constitution guarantees equal rights for women. > > Unofficially, nobody has a lot of real rights in North Korea. So it’s easy to deny women the same rights men are denied. And North Korea is so closed off, it’s virtually impossible to gather statistics about what’s really going on. Similarly, Romania was a communist country with equal rights for men and women, AFAIK - and in 1966 banned abortion. In The Good Old Days, since manufactured products like condoms and birth control pills were notoriously in short supply, many Iron Curtain countries the women used abortion for birth control - doctors and hospitals were not in short supply. Some women had had 10 or more abortions by age 30 (thus proving that “an abortion will make it harder to get pregnant next time” is a bald-faced lie). In 1966 the regime noticed that birth rates were down significantly, after all who wanted to bring children into a miserable life? The government banned abortion, and for about a year the demographic was interesting until women figured out other means. Apparently that year’s class in school was double the preceding and following class sizes. It is also, I’ve heard, a cause of the extreme misery of over-capacity Romanian orphanages as the economy fell apart. (Joke - Q:“What did Romanians use for light before candles?” A:“Light bulbs.” ) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-any-country-that-banned-abortion-ever-given-women-equal-rights/766159.md?page=2)