• NPR: Romanian Orphan Adoption
• Washington Post: 

“The brain is dependent on experience to develop normally,” he said. “What happens in situations of neglect, such as kids raised in institutions, is that the experiences are lacking. So the brain is sort of in a holding pattern saying, ‘Okay, so where’s the experience? Where’s the experience? Where’s the experience?’ And when the experience fails to occur, those circuits either fail to develop or they develop in an atypical fashion — and the result is, in a sense, the mis-wiring of circuits.”

“The big question is, what happens 10 or 20 or 30 years down the line,” he said. “The speculation would be you will progressively find yourself more and more disadvantaged or more and more handicapped.”

• Scientific American: Orphanages Rival Foster Homes for Care
• America’s child welfare system
• Scientific American: Romanian Orphanages

In a misguided effort to enhance economic productivity, Nicolae Ceausescu decreed in 1966 that Romania would develop its “human capital” via a government-enforced mandate to increase the country’s population. Ceauşescu, Romania’s leader from 1965 to 1989, banned contraception and abortions and imposed a “celibacy tax” on families that had fewer than five children. State doctors—the menstrual police—conducted gynecologic examinations in the workplace of women of childbearing age to see whether they were producing sufficient offspring. The birth rate initially skyrocketed. Yet because families were too poor to keep their children, they abandoned many of them to large state-run institutions. By 1989 this social experiment led to more than 170,000 children living in these facilities.

• Izador Ruckel buy the book and Washington Post piece on him