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September 22, 2005
France wants babies
Middle-class mothers in France could be paid up to €1,000 (£675) a month - almost the minimum wage - to stop work for a year and have a third child under a government scheme to boost the birthrate, already among the highest in Europe.
Despite female employment statistics that are the envy of the continent, the government remains worried about the reluctance of better-educated women to have babies. A plan to be unveiled by the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, today is expected to double an existing cash incentive for big families.
"Big" is apparently a relative term...
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Get me a ticket for an aeroplane...
Posted by: Lickona at Sep 22, 2005 11:51:23 AM
From the American Thinker:
Unspoken in the policy, though covered in the Washington Times article, is the demographic reality that low income Muslim women in France are having babies at a rate that will make France a predominantly Muslim country in the lifetimes of many of today's children. Tying aid to salary will increasr the incentive for upper income French women to have babies.
Only higher-income working women (read: non-immigrant, non-minority) need apply.
Gee, maybe in America we should start offering child-bonuses to women with graduate degrees. Wouldn't that go over well? Having lived in Berkeley since the early 1980's, I know a lot of women with Ph.D.'s that would gladly have more kids if the government paid them, say, $50,000 for a year, with no guarantees of no interruption/damage to their careers.
The policy in France is a not-so-subtle way to make more white French babies.
Posted by: Zhou at Sep 22, 2005 11:55:49 AM
I second Zhou's observations.
I do find it interesting that the article identifies France as having one of the highest birth rates in Europe. If my memory serves correctly, its still not at a replacement rate and, as noted above, it's as high as it is because it's largely the Muslim immigrants who are having the babies.
Weigel covers the depopulation of Europe well in The Cube and the Cathedral.
Posted by: Sean Gallagher at Sep 22, 2005 12:09:50 PM
Whether it’s a violent, coercive one child policy or the physical, intellectual, and spiritual sterility of a contraceptive culture on the one hand or the nationalist push for babies (see also Third Reich) on the other hand...it’s still all micromanaging fertility.
Posted by: mcmlxix at Sep 22, 2005 12:24:19 PM
Oh, heck, if y'all are going to get all ethical about it, I suppose I'll just have to have my non-subsidized (well, except for the child tax credit) large family here in the states. I just got a kick out of the idea of soaking the government as it tried to buy a population, and soaking up a fair amount of good, cheap French wine at the same time...
Posted by: Lickona at Sep 22, 2005 12:35:11 PM
Hey Matt, go ahead and enjoy the wine. The French Muslims don't want it, but will probably sell it to you. I'm more concerned about their impact on the coffee market...
Posted by: Zhou at Sep 22, 2005 12:55:20 PM
Wow, 50,000 dollars? Zhou, I'm a Ph.D. holding woman who has three kids and earns less than that working outside the home full time. I would love a raise to stay home :) (Actually, I'd love a raise. Period.)
As for "micromanaging fertility," a pro-natalist policy hardly compares to murdering babies in their mothers' wombs, either by intent, motivation, or coercion of free will. Surely French women can make more money working -- this policy allows them to do something if they want to do it already.
Posted by: Jen P at Sep 22, 2005 2:23:44 PM
Well, Jen, you have no idea how much it costs to get a latte for mom and three kids hot chocolates at a cafe in Berkeley....
Seriously, at UC Berkeley, assistant (non-tenure) professors have a mean salary of over $60K/year. Full professors are well over $100K/year on the average.
Posted by: Zhou at Sep 22, 2005 2:33:38 PM
Zhou,
We sure don't make that much here at CUA!
Posted by: Michael at Sep 22, 2005 2:38:10 PM
And I did it all (had nine kids) without even a child tax credit. And with a very low dependent deduction, especially before the mid 80's.
I don't get it though.How are they working it to give this money only to upper income type people? How can they get away with that?
SFP
Posted by: Susan Peterson at Sep 22, 2005 2:46:57 PM
Susan,
The proposed incentive is a proportion of income. The more you earn, the more you get.
God Bless
Posted by: Chris Sullivan at Sep 22, 2005 3:00:49 PM
My Guess: It's not going to work
Reason 1: ~$12,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of raising children in Western society. Economically it doesn't make sense.
Reason 2: Well educated stay-at-home mothers are often the target of disdain by their peers. (What do you do? You're a stay-at-home mom? Why, you have a Ph.D.!) Also highly secularized and/or socialist societies have atomized the familial structures, weakening the connections between the nuclear family, the extended family, and the community. This makes it very difficult to have large families. Socially, it doesn't make sense.
Reason 3: Highly secularized societies have forgotten the religious exhortation to "Be fruitful and multiply". It also no longer emphasizes the transcendent value of sacrificial love, which is central to raising a family. For those for whom secularism is their ersatz religion, spiritually it doesn't make sense.
Reason 4: The formative effect of spending 10-20 years in adolescence in which no permanent vow is taken and many sexual experiences are gained results in a habit of self-centeredness, which is yet another force against having children. Psychologically, it doesn't make sense.
Posted by: Noah Nehm at Sep 22, 2005 3:29:20 PM
While I think the whole thing is uncomfortably racist, I'm also curious -- in an era and region where women and men ostensibly have the same access to jobs and education, why not make the incentive available to men who want to stop work for a year to take care of a third child? Isn't it remotely possible that male professional tracks also impact the shape and size of families?
Posted by: midwestmind at Sep 22, 2005 3:56:25 PM
So some don’t think that I’m making precise comparisons where I didn’t intend to make any, my point is with the nefarious matter of social engineering...period. And I think that the context for this is well illustrated by Noah Nehm. As long as France (or any people) is collectively is a nation of perpetual adolescence, deliberate infertility, and materialism, it’s utterly schizophrenic to simultaneously propose what the French are.
It’s a matter of first things and not correcting one erroneous piece of cultural engineering with another all the while still maintaining the first.
Posted by: mcmlxix at Sep 22, 2005 4:52:31 PM
In fact, France has a long history of encouraging large families by paying bonuses.
Posted by: Mary Campbell Gallagher at Sep 22, 2005 5:37:05 PM
"The policy in France is a not-so-subtle way to make more white French babies."
You have a problem with this Zhou ? How so, given that the proportion of whites is going decline in the absence of any proactive government policy.
Posted by: Ivan at Sep 22, 2005 7:03:10 PM
"The policy in France is a not-so-subtle way to make more white French babies."
"White French" can also be taken as "traditional French" or "ethnic French". France has always had an attitude about "French ethnicity"; the closer you get to the capital, the stronger it gets. Usually they defined it as language and culture, but now they seem to be narrowing in on "French" as in pre-Islamic immigration wave.
It is also more difficult for an ethnic immigrant to assimilate in Europe than in America, and both French French and French Muslims don't want to assimilate the other.
Jus Soli vs Jus Sanguinis in defining who you are. Tribal peoples (including Arabs) are Jus Sanguinis (Law of Blood, i.e. your ethnic/tribal/clan ancestry), Yanks are pretty much Jus Soli (Law of Soil, i.e. where you were born/live), and Europeans are somewhere in between.
Posted by: Ken at Sep 22, 2005 7:12:37 PM
Susan:
I just want to say God bless you and thank you! For having nine children.
Posted by: Septimus at Sep 22, 2005 8:39:37 PM
Zhou, after the elections last year, the WSJ's "Best of the Web" linked to a story written by a woman in the Bay Area who had had three children. The woman related that she sometimes got nasty stares and comments (such as "Disgusting!") when she was out with the kids. San Franciscians can tolerate just about anything, but a married (hetro) couple with 3 kids is apparently too weird for them. No wonder that SF has the lowest percentage of children of any US metropolitan area. It's not just expense: there seems to be an idea that traditional families with more than 2 kids are simply a bit too traditional.
The whole "Zero Population Growth" crowd back in the '70's sure got its' message out. I frequently meet people - and they're not PC San Franciscians either - who still believe the world is way overpopulated and are suprised when I tell them depopulation is a big problem in advanced Western societies. We are holding our own only because of immigration.
Does anyone else recall the NY Times article written by a Manhattan woman who found she was pregnant with triplets and had one of them aborted? She just had to do it, you see. The alternative was too horrible for words: She couldn't have afforded to live in Manhattan anymore. Her triplets would have grown up in some declasse place like Staten Island and she would have had to start shopping at Sam's Club and Target instead of Zabar's and Saks. I pictured beautifully coiffed heads in Manhattan's coffee shops reading that story and nodding in sympathy with the poor dear's plight.
I had to wonder, though, what the 2 remaining kids will think and feel someday when Mommy Dearest tells them why there isn't 3 of them. Will they nod and say "Well, somebody had to be sacrificed so we could have piano lessons and private school. I'm just glad it wasn't me?" Or,...,will they be filled with rage and sadness and "survivor's guilt?"
Posted by: Donna at Sep 22, 2005 8:51:31 PM
Did you notice at the end of the article the maternity leave for women in Ireland, England, France and so on? All vastly superior to the United States.
My God--26 weeks maternity leave in Ireland!! I once again salute the land of my forebears. I wonder if it is all paid. I hope so.
In the United States, most women are lucky to get six weeks. Sometimes these new mothers will throw in their two weeks vacation to stretch it out, and then of course there is (usually unpaid) family leave.
I know of a manager who, by hook and by crook, stretched out a co-worker's paid maternity leave of six weeks into 16 weeks paid. He b.s.'d his way around this woman's extended absence. He was blessed with colleagues--some married, some single--who picked up the slack with absolutely no bitching about it. This woman had had an extremely difficult pregnancy, the baby was premature and the boyfriend, alas, had bugged out. She had health insurance but still faced steep out-of-pocket costs.
That premature baby is now a healthy, chubby, impish, utterly captivating 19-month-old boy.
Posted by: Whitcomb at Sep 23, 2005 12:05:12 AM
And yet, back in the day, my Ma took a 12-year unpaid leave of absence from working in the medical industry to raise 3 kids... and her mother never worked a paying job, and raised 6 kids. They didn't need to be paid to have kids -- but I think I saw some of what is keeping the numbers down. I remember my Ma being denigrated by the career-is-everything women, and assumed to be stupid because she was a stay-at-home mom. She had gone to college -- she had been an RN. Heck, she did better in Calculus than my dad had (he was an engineering major).
But nope, stay-at-home mom means dumb, barefoot baby-factory to many.
Posted by: Meep at Sep 23, 2005 5:10:34 AM
Naw, a woman who stays home with her kids is an object of envy. "Your husband is letting you stay home? Wow, that's great" or "Well, we'll miss you a lot, but I can't blame you" are the reactions at my company.
For some reason, we are also notoriously a place where the infertile suddenly find themselves having babies. We constantly joke about it being in the water. I suspect it's more some kind of hormone effect of being a workplace that's 80 or 90 percent female....
However, mothers really do suffer a loss of a lot of camaraderie. Nobody else (adult) is home, you see. "Good" workplaces like ours are even more likely to make mothers feel homesick for work.
Posted by: Maureen at Sep 23, 2005 5:56:44 AM
I just saw an athletic shoe ad which asked, "Do you do it for love or money?" We did it for love...
But I won't say the article didn't tickle my imagination when I first saw it.
Posted by: Ellyn at Sep 23, 2005 7:08:13 AM
"In fact, France has a long history of encouraging large families by paying bonuses."
In a 1950 Sunday Times column, Nancy Mitford reported from Paris on the "stunning results" of the drive for large families, which included incentives such as being allowed to jump to the head of queues as well as cash and tax benefits. A sign of the different times: the latter kicked in at the *sixth* child. Since it's Nancy Mitford, you have to take it with a grain of salt, but she describes fashionable young couples retiring to the country upon their marriage, to get their breeding out of the way.
"There is a new fashion, too, in the announcemenmt of these births in the _Figaro_, the equivalent of our _Times_. Instead of, as formerly, Le duc et la duchesse de Sauveterre ont la joie d'annoncer la naissance de leur fils Sosthene, we read, Oriane, Odette, Marie-Ange, Palamede, et Raimon de Sauveterre ont la joie d'annoncer la naissance de leur frere Sosthene, so that everybody can see how the Sauveterres are getting on. Soon after Sosthene has been christened, the Sauveterre house in the rue du Bac is taken out of its dust sheets and furbished up, the Duchess sheds her country clothes and is smartened up, and no social occasion is hereafter complete without this lucky couple."
Posted by: Anne-Marie at Sep 23, 2005 7:25:35 AM
Zhou, I think the "mean" is confusing you. The humanities tend to pay beans compared to the sciences or business. I would guess the mean for assistant professor here in St. Louis is roughly 60,000, too, with a much lower cost of living.
I'd still be thrilled to hit 50,000 before promotion/tenure....
Posted by: Jen P at Sep 23, 2005 9:02:12 AM
