FOR the past year I have been sending personal relief packages to a woman friend in Romania. I post the aid in standard letter sized envelopes so that it does not attract the attention of customs officers.

The envelopes contain the contraceptive pill which, six years after the legalisation of contraception and abortion, is still very difficult to obtain in the country.

In Romania's fledgling market economy, women can buy French perfumes or Swiss watches on the high street. But despite the efforts of non governmental organisations (NGOs) which provide family planning services, access to reliable birth control is today little better than it was during the years of dictator rule by Nicolae Ceausescu, during which condoms and contraceptive pills were available only on the black market.

We all know about the unwanted orphaned child victims of Ceausescu's vigorously pronatalist population policies. But the impact of these policies on women's health has not yet been fully documented.

In fact, there are many thousands of women with low grade chronic infections due to backstreet abortions. One fifth of the country's 5.2 million women of reproductive age may now be infertile, according to unofficial estimates - that's twice the number expected for the population size.

While women no longer have to undergo the humiliation of mandatory gynaecological examinations in their workplaces to prevent them from attempting to terminate unwanted pregnancies, they are still a long way from having control of their ovaries.

The freedom for women to regulate their own fertility exists only for those privileged enough or well connected enough to ensure access to safe and reliable family planning facilities.

In other areas too, Romanian women are finding that the transit ion from communist regime to capitalist democracy has done little to advance their human freedoms and much to erode whatever social and economic privileges they had previously enjoyed.

In a 1994 survey by the Bucharest based United Nations development project, Women In Development, 52 per cent of women and 41 per cent of men, agreed that the situation for women has worsened since 1989.

The loss of equal job opportunities is the most obvious aspect of this deterioration.

In the bad old days under Ceausescu, the automatic assignment of jobs to the best graduates regardless of gender and the setting of quotas for women in decision making positions in the workplace and the parliament ensured at least a semblance of formal equality of job and promotion opportunity.

Almost full female employment in the State controlled professional and non professional sectors was the norm. Women's jobs may have been lowly paid and far from fulfilling, as were men's, but at least they had them. And because it was considered women's "patriotic duty" to reproduce, the state paid women 65 per cent of their wages throughout year long maternity leaves.

But in the free market fray that has followed the events of December 1989, these gender neutral and family friendly provisions are either being ditched or circumvented because they detract from the bottom line.

Female secondary school graduates are now three times as likely as their male counterparts to be unemployed, with twice as many 25-29 year old women unemployed as men.

Private sector employers are now reluctant to hire young women at all because they may, to use their own euphemistic phrase, make problems" by becoming pregnant.

Because of the country's high inflation rates and their own often limited capital, employers can't afford to pay a woman's maternity leave in advance - even though they are entitled to full reimbursement from the state.

As a result of these market driven, anti women trends, moral values viewed as universal under the communist regime are no longer so. Women are being pigeon holed into an ideology that defines them exclusively by their biology, one that would have them return to their "natural" duties in the home in order to make way for the men to take over in the market place.

It is not just from the free enterprise zone that women are being ousted. The employment quota system, because it was used in order to promote Ceausescu's wife, Elena, has now been totally discredited and in the fierce political struggles which followed Ceausescu's downfall, women are gradually losing their places at the tables of all high level decision making. There is no woman party leader, minister or ambassador and the number of women parliamentarians has dropped dramatically from one in three to one in 26.

Times are hard economically for most people and political leaders - as well as many women themselves see women's interests as secondary to the interests of the country and the economy as a whole. In finest western democratic tradition, they are fast losing sight of the fact that women's interests, just like men's interests and children's interests, are intrinsic to those of society in general.

Western experts, funded by large EU grants, offer advice and scientific formulae on how to democratise the economic and political system. Yet, little thought has been given to what political and economic change means for the millions of women in the society who for decades have worked along with men in both factories and fields as well as performing their duties in the home.

DURING Ceausescu's 25 year regime, individual rights were abused and subsumed in the name of the greater good. Women's rights are now being abused and subsumed in the false name of progress.

Few could have anticipated that the collapse of communism in Romania would pull asunder a significant part of what women had achieved in the sphere of equality of the sexes. Few would have believed that the return to the eternally cherished values of traditional democracy would mean the return of women to their eternal secondary role.

Six years after they celebrated the dawning of a new era of freedom and democracy, Romania's women are finding that it was a false dawn both socially and economically.

I look forward to the dawning of that day when my friend no longer needs my regular aid packages.