Ron and Natalie quickly learned that this wasn’t going to be a simple adoption. Before they could take Rodica home to Canada, they got some bad news about her health.
At just one year old, Rodica had developed rickets, which is a disease that’s caused by a lack of vitamin D. Children with this disease have bones that are improperly calcified, which means that their bones are soft and fragile.
The good news is that rickets is curable. Rodica just needed to get some more sunlight and take some vitamin D supplements. The bad news was that she couldn’t play as much as she would have liked to for a while because her bones were so fragile.
Unfortunately, Rodica wasn’t the only orphan at the Romanian orphanage with rickets. She wasn’t the only abandoned child, either. Back in the 1990s, Romania was under the control of Nicolae Ceauşescu, a dictator who banned all kinds of contraception. As you can imagine, this had catastrophic results.
Because of Ceauşescu’s policy, people became pregnant with unwanted children that they didn’t have the means to take care of. All of those unwanted children ended up in orphanages around the country.
