The French government, concerned about the country’s falling birth rate, has decided it needs to do something dramatic to encourage its young men and women to crack on with the business of starting a family.
So it has come up with a 16-point plan to spearhead what Emmanuel Macron has referred to, with characteristic French elegance, as the country’s “demographic rearmament”.
We don’t yet know much of what’s involved in points 2 to 16, but point number one was not, as you might hope, to promise to improve the childcare system or offer women more than a stingy four months’ paid maternity leave. It wasn’t to tackle the housing crisis. It wasn’t even a complimentary bottle of Minervois and a night in a nice hotel – the tool deployed by a Polish hotel chain in an effort to do its bit to combat the country’s future pension crisis (and presumably get a bit of Ryanair-style free publicity).
Instead, it resolved to write a letter to every 29-year-old in the country – in much the manner you might if, say, you wanted to ask your neighbours to avoid parking in front of your house, or to stop their cat using your herbaceous borders as a litter tray.
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If the prospect of some middle-ranking bureaucrat in the Department of Health writing to passive-aggressively suggest that you’re a bit old not to be thinking about babies doesn’t get you in the mood, it’s hard to imagine what would.
Pro-natalism is having a moment, mostly spearheaded by creepy autocrats who regard the population replacement rate as a goal to be smashed, like their golf handicap or the Nasdaq index. See Elon Musk, who said the decline in women having children is “one of the biggest risks to civilisation”. Donald Trump: “We want more babies, to put it nicely”. JD Vance: “I want more babies in the United States of America”. Vance promptly set about, as he put it, leading by example. “Let the record show you have a vice-president who practices what he preaches,” he smirked, announcing the happy news of the imminent arrival of his fourth child with wife Usha, as though her role in the whole thing is merely incidental. (Usha, now 40, had previously gone on the record to say she was “done” after their third child and that she was relieved to be “past the baby phase”.)
It isn’t, of course, that Trump, Vance, Musk and Viktor Orban are simply baby-mad. But the only other way to deal with the looming pension crisis, as the younger working population falls and the retired population grows, would be to embrace immigration. And they don’t want that.
Now France is leaping on the Handmaid’s Tale bandwagon, writing to the country’s 29-year-olds reminding them that both men and women have a biological clock – but don’t panic guys, “it’s not the same” – and they should think about availing of the free egg freezing on offer for women aged 29 to 37.
[ Brianna Parkins: I’m using my house deposit to freeze my eggsOpens in new window ]
Some men are not impressed: a few have been quoted as saying this initiative is treating them like children. The first thing to be said about this is they’re absolutely right – it is patronising, alarmist and tone deaf about the real reasons people are delaying parenthood.
The second thing to say is: welcome to our world, gents. Women have for decades been chided, warned, terrified, blamed, lectured, nagged, panicked and harangued about the fertility cliff we are supposed to plunge headlong off when we hit our mid 30s. It always amazes me that nobody ever seems to address any of this to men. France, to its credit, has at least acknowledged that the continuation of the species is not an exclusively female concern.
But a pompous letter from the government and the promise of free egg freezing – which is far from a panacea – is unlikely to do much about the falling fertility rate anywhere.
The same trend is in evidence in Ireland, where the Central Statistics Office predicts the total fertility rate will drop to 1.3 by 2037 and the number of babies born to women over 40 has risen by 21 per cent in a decade. Women having babies into their 40s is a sign of advances in healthcare and not something we should be unduly alarmist about.
[ Ireland’s mothers are the oldest in the EU. Why?Opens in new window ]
But, at the same time, these women presumably didn’t just wake up one day and think “Oops! I knew there was something I’d forgotten”. Nor are the men waiting until their 40s to become fathers or delaying it permanently – a statistic the CSO doesn’t appear to collate – merely being total featherheads. In many cases, couples are making an entirely rational choice. They would quite like to have a home and some financial security, which is difficult when you’re paying extortionate rent and trying to save for a deposit so that you might be able to get a mortgage before you turn 50. Most probably want to be in a relationship. And then – just like the hectoring letter from the French government warns – all of this takes so long they sometimes find themselves bumping into a fertility crisis.
What do women want this Valentine’s Day? Not a chiding letter about their declining egg reserves – or even an offer of egg freezing, or a complimentary night in a hotel in exchange for a bit of babymaking. Certainly not a lecture from Musk or a leering Trump. All of this tinkering around with the symptoms is like offering a pillow to someone who finds themselves tied to the tracks with a train barrelling towards them.
The real reason fewer people are starting a family is that we’ve built a world that makes it very hard. Until that changes – or attitudes to migration do – expect population rates to continue to fall.
The Irish Times is interested to hear from men and women about planning for parenthood. What is your situation now, does future fertility concern you, and have you considered egg-freezing?
You are invited to share your experience or opinion in the form below. A selection of responses may be published – please state if you would like to be named or anonymised.
