Child poverty is a red flag

But not in the most family-friendly country of the world

Invited by Babeș–Bolyai University, I was in Cluj, the capital of Transylvania on the 20-21st of November. Andrea Pető and I presented our work titled Viktor Orbán’s Affairs with Women. No, the book is not a juicy political pulp fiction. It is an analyses of the past 15 years of Hungarian society through the lens of its female population, written deliberately in an easy-to-access way for everyone to become a beneficiary. Fun fact: at the English-language lecture, the audience was roughly half Hungarian and half Romanian. I’ve been unable to stop myself thinking since the event: what might be the reason behind the fact that only the Romanians dared to ask questions? The memory of the Securitate can’t still be so vivid that the Hungarians present—whose lives the topic presumably affects more directly than those of the Romanians—didn’t dare speak up for fear of who might be watching…?

In the informal conversations after the lecture, one of the latest Hungarian public scandals, the KSH statistical data affair also came up. Both Hungarians and Romanians living in Romania agreed that no matter how rampant political and economic populism has become, there is still something no political force in Romania would ever dare to do: allow the universal, per-child benefits to be eroded by inflation. Advocates of perverse redistribution must find alternative ways to work with, because child poverty is off-limits. How is that possible, when Romania lagged miles behind Hungary at the time when communism fell in both countries?

The answer lies in one of the most brutal and senseless measures of the Ceaușescu era. In the mid-1960s, the dictator decided that the key to Romania’s economic prosperity lay in increasing the labor force. And how does one increase the labor force in a country no one wishes to immigrate to for work? Obviously by substantially raising the birth rate — a slow but promising process, if one employed more forceful methods than Orbán-led Hungary’s pro-natalist measures that failed spectacularly.

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Countries aiming for unorthodox paths often cast their watchful eyes on Pannonia, a country modest in size and economic power yet remarkably inventive in ideological experimentation. It is not impossible that Ceaușescu imported his own solution of the 1960s from Hungary as well. A decade before the Romanian dictator’s course of action, the Katalin Novák of communist Hungary, Anna Ratkó gave her name to a scheme combining strict abortion bans with special taxes levied on childless adults. The policy was designed at higher political levels, of course. As a footnote we might clarify here that abortion was legalised in Hungary originally to manage the inconvenient consequences of the mass rapes committed by the Soviet soldiers — the so-called ‘liberators’ — in the last months and the aftermath of WWII. In a couple of years, however, it became clear that the socialist economy needed more working hands, and the faithful ‘Soviet woman’ could only be a feminist for as long as her emancipation served the interests of the state. That is, as long as she could clock in to poorly paid jobs alongside raising children and performing the unpaid household labor expected of her.

Ceaușescu dared to dream even bigger than Rákosi, not to mention Ratkó. The Romanian dictator banned all forms of contraception and imposed special taxes on families with fewer than as many as five children. Whatever became of the children later may be slightly familiar from the logic of today’s Hungarian family policies. Romanian birth rates skyrocketed — as did overall and child poverty levels. Tens of thousands of families relinquished the children they could no longer afford to raise. Institutionalising children became an accepted practice. The crimes committed against children during the Ceaușescu-era remain an unprocessed historical trauma in Romania. Child poverty is not something to toy with there.

In Hungary child poverty is also taboo but not because it cannot be imposed on certain segments of society. It cannot be discussed, however, at least not without risk. The same phenomenon was typical of communist Hungary as well. The Central Statistical Office did gather data even during state socialism, although the numbers were only revealed to the leaders of the chosen officials of the communist party. Reality, however, had its ways to bite. Even children understood that in Hungary the surest path to impoverishment was having children. How do I know this?

I’m not proud of it. Back then I didn’t yet understand why my mother so often told me, ‘you shouldn’t say everything that crosses your mind.’ Melinda, an elementary school classmate of mine, had two siblings — something quite rare by Kádár-era standards, not unrelated to the fact that abortions, once again fully legal, had become the primary method of birth control. Most families had two children. Schoolchildren often find strange little ways to prove they’re special. Melinda liked to boast of having two siblings. I couldn’t articulate why this irritated me so much. Perhaps because I couldn’t see what merit she thought she had in that fact.

One day I went to school in a new sweater. Since we were all forced to wear the universally unflattering blue school smock, it was hard to show off with the help of new clothes. That was the original idea behind the piece of clothing generally made of synthetic fabric. Melinda still noticed the orange sweater by the sleave. We didn’t really fancy each other, so we didn’t talk much, but that day she said she liked it. Ignoring my mother’s advice, I replied off-handedly: ‘Well, I have a nice sweater, while you have to do with two siblings.’

A huge scandal erupted. My mother, who taught at the school, had to fend off accusations that her ten-year-old despised large families. But in truth it was simply that, at ten, I already knew — just as did my teachers — that raising a third child was not compatible with regularly replacing one’s wardrobe. And no KSH data was needed to understand that. Why, then, do the prime minister’s advisers — those who accuse others of asking the ‘wrong’ questions — believe that anyone’s grasp of reality depends on how often they flip through those data sets?

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