Are half of Romanian children born outside Romania? No, that's not true: This myth is spread by Romanian and Hungarian politicians but data from Romania's National Institute of Statistics (INS) contradicts the claim.
The claim appeared in a TikTok video (archived here) published by the Hungarian government party, Fidesz, on December 11, 2023. It features a quote from one of their lawmakers, Bence Retvari:
Romania, where, according to the latest data of Eurostat, 24% of people does not have a flushing toilet and half of the children are born outside the country.
(Translated from Hungarian to English by Lead Stories staff).
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Dec 13 17:06:59 2023 UTC)
This TikTok uses several short clips from the Hungarian Parliament's regular livestream from December 11, 2023. Ferenc Gelencsér, the parliamentary faction leader of the opposition party, Momentum, mentioned in his speech (archived here) that Romania had left Hungary behind as their GDP compared to the EU average was 0.1 percent higher than Hungary's GDP. In his answer, (archived here) State Secretary at the Ministry of Human Resources Bence Retvari claimed that according to the latest Eurostat data, 24 percent of Romanian homes don't have a flushing toilet, and half of Romanian children are born outside of Romania.
The latter is a long-time myth regularly used by Romanian politicians as well. The Romanian National Institute of Statistics (INS) told the leading Romanian newspaper Libertatea (archived here) that out of 188,000 children, almost 17,500 were born abroad, which is only around 10 percent, not the majority.
The claim about the number of flushing toilets, mentioned in the TikTok, is also wrong. According to the latest data from Eurostat from 2020 (archived here), 22.8 percent of the population of Romania did not have a flushing toilet while this number was 24.2 percent in 2019.
