Making babies for France  
      William Pfaff 

      SATURDAY, JULY 30, 2005
     


     
      PARIS France's women have always enjoyed a reputation for bold and 
seductive elegance, and for intelligence, but now they have added to that 
evidence of a new willingness to combine work and motherhood, and a currently 
unparalleled ability to do so. 

      Their envied ability to eat what they want and stay slim thus is not the 
only paradox they present to their contemporaries in a Europe that, overall, 
confronts a grave demographic decline. Frenchwomen are now having as many 
babies, proportionately, as mothers in Catholic Ireland. Both countries have 
the highest birthrate in the European Union: 1.9 children per woman, as against 
an EU 25-nation average of 1.4 (a figure implying sharp population decline). At 
this rate, France would become the most populous country in the EU by 
midcentury. 

      France at the same time has the EU's highest female employment and 
professional activity. 

      Eighty percent of Frenchwomen between 24 and 49 work, including those 
with children under 3. In Europe overall, women stay in the work force by not 
having children. Frenchwomen, as a sociologist, François de Singly comments, 
"are mothers but also are determined to maintain their professional and 
educational accomplishments as well as their 'capital de séduction."' 

      Theirs is a model of feminine independence increasingly imitated 
elsewhere in Europe. 

      This determination is supported by a system of state assistance that 
makes it possible for working women to have that second or third child without 
damaging the family budget. 

      It began in the 1970s, in a typical French government technocratic 
concern for developing the service sector, for which women seemed a prime labor 
source. Therefore free, full-time municipal crèches, or nurseries for the very 
young, were expanded. Free public pre-kindergartens and canteens were vastly 
increased in number, as well as subsidized vacation camps during school 
holidays. Competition for places in these institutions remains high, and is 
increasingly subject to means tests, but this has simply pushed the development 
of cooperative crèches organized by better-off families. 

      This had an important psychological as well as practical effect, 
legitimating the decision of young mothers to go back to work. There are also 
state financial incentives - family allowances, support for the volunteer 
crèches formed by groups of mothers, and family tax benefits, many of which 
increase significantly with a third child. 

      The result is that more than in any other European country, French 
families now have three or more children. Germany and Switzerland also give 
generous family benefits, and in Sweden 77 percent of the children under 6 are 
in crèches, but birth rates stay well under that in France. 

      While the birthrate of immigrants in Europe is nearly everywhere higher 
than for women of nonimmigrant origin, the French phenomenon of enlarging 
families is particularly noticeable in the middle and professional classes. 

      After the 1968 social revolution, the rate of births outside marriage 
increased dramatically, even though the parents often either stayed together or 
formed new but relatively stable relationships. Today nearly half of French 
children are born outside marriage, but increasingly in "recomposed" families, 
largely free from social disapproval, and continuing to receive state benefits. 

      France's population actually remained stagnant at some 40 million during 
the century between 1840 and 1940, and in the 1930s even began to decline. Then 
a sharp upswing coincided with the Second World War. Between 1940 and 2000, the 
French population increased to 60 million, the largest increase in Europe. 

      The United Nations now estimates a population of 63.4 million by 2025. 
Frenchwomen now have the second-longest life expectancy in the developed world: 
84, next to that of Japanese women. 

      The reasons for change in national birthrates remain obscure, and 
population projections are notoriously unreliable. Nonetheless, it is not hard 
to find political and social correlations. The former Soviet Union has suffered 
a collapse of birthrates since the failure of the Soviet system demoralized 
millions of people, throwing them into social and economic distress or 
uncertainty. Suddenly there seemed no reliable future. France, on the other 
hand, is a high-morale society today, sure of itself and of the ultimate 
validity of its model of society, despite the chronic pessimism with which the 
French public responds to public opinion polls. 

      In French society, to be pessimistic is to be intellectually serious. To 
have babies now is à la mode.
      http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/29/opinion/edpfaff.php 

     


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