Youthful readers! Are you on the point of turning 29? Still able to get through Sunday lunch with the parents without an emergency call to the therapist? Strangely sanguine despite your absence from the Forbes 30 Under 30 list? Saddled with an inexplicable sense that your life is still on track?
The French government is here to change all that. As part of the nation’s 16-point national fertility plan, the Ministry of Health is to write to all 29-year-olds, male and female, to remind you that you might want to think about having children before it’s too late. Tick-tock, or as our French cousins prefer to say, Tic-Tac.
To be fair to the French government – headed by Emmanuel Macron (personal Macron progeny: Zero) – they are offering some practical help. Their advice targets 29-year-olds because this is the age at which French women can freeze their eggs without a medical certificate. French women are supported to have eggs frozen free of charge anytime between the ages of 29 to 37, which given the thousands of pounds spent by British women seeking this service, is game-changing.
Egg-freezing has been a revolutionary aid to 21st-century family planning, and many British women will be profoundly envious of the free services offered to their French counterparts. Its primary function, however, is simply to delay the crunch point at women are forced to decide if they really want children, or if they plan to remain child-free for life.
France, like all European nations, is anxious about how to maintain its population in the face of a dramatic decline in fertility. (This week’s headlines are the latest political repercussions of a shock report at the beginning of 2024, which revealed a 6.6 per cent drop in birth rates across 2023 and a full 20 per cent from a peak in 2020.)
The root causes of that population drop, however, are much the same as in the UK: debilitating costs for housing and childcare, a rise in the broader cost of living, and a widespread sense of unease about the future. Young people in France and Britain today, unlike their parents, experience very little material improvement in economic stability between the ages of 29 and 39. Macron can pack every 29-year-old woman off to an egg-freezing centre, and in the name of gender equality, lecture their male partners about the impact of smoking on quality of sperm, but until he addresses the economic insecurity of the young French population, he’ll see very little return.
What should worry the rest of us is the question what happens next, across France, Britain and all our neighbours, when medical approaches to boosting national fertility are seen to fail. Throughout Europe, national soul-searching about fertility is invariably tied to the febrile politics of immigration.
There is only one European nation which produced enough babies in 2024 to maintain its own population level: Monaco. So unless we want to replicate the demographics of a tax haven slightly smaller than London’s Hyde Park, the rest of us will have to rely on first generation migrants to pay our pensions, staff our care homes and maintain our public services. This cultural anxiety this generates is catnip to the far right, but it’s not an issue the rest of us can afford to ignore. As more moderate approaches fail, we can expect to see more aggressive government interventions to keep women, and especially white women, pumping out babies. Already, President Macron has characterised France’s fertility policy as a “demographic rearmament”.
Here in Britain, the prospect of a Reform government offers the most likely scenario for pro-natalist policies to shape our future. When Parliament’s magazine The House interviewed Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch about these issues last year, she was circumspect enough to recognise that family planning was not an area of life that government can easily mandate. Reform was more aggressive: “The answer is, import young people or grow our own. We’d rather grow our own,” a party source told journalist Sienna Rodgers.
For an idea of what such policies would mean, take a look at Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, inspiration to illiberal politicians the world over. Many of Orbán’s incentives for families are economic: the CSOK Plus scheme offers government loans to families seeking to expand their homes, while the Babaváró (or Baby-Expecting Loan) allows the government to subsidise the interest on bank loans to married couples, and guarantees forgiveness of the debt if they go on to have at least three children.
Yet they are rarely available for the type of families Orbán doesn’t like: same-sex parents, single mothers, and immigrants or their descendants. (If racist pro-natalist politicians in the UK can’t find a legal way explicitly to deny these incentives to non-white families, we should expect to see them restricted only to families able to prove multiple generations of UK citizenship). They also fall into the same trap as Macron’s faith in egg-freezing: delaying loan repayments only delays the costs of raising a large family, rather than reducing them.
As in all pro-natalist nationalist governments, Hungary’s push for more babies has come with tighter restrictions on reproductive choice. The Romanian dictator Ceauşescu became so concerned by the country’s low birth rate in 1967 – and so incensed by growing numbers of women in the workforce – that he signed the notorious decree 7700, banning both abortion and contraception. The consequence was the overcrowding of Romanian orphanages during the 1970s and 80s, creating child misery on an appalling scale. Even France is already showing signs of going in the same direction, requiring a four-month cooling-off period for men seeking a vasectomy. Most nations seeking to prevent their citizens from regulating their own fertility are unlikely to make such gestures towards gender equality.
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Given a free choice, young people will only have children if they are confident about the future. That seems harder than ever in the era of climate change and geopolitical crises. The greatest help any government can offer is with childcare, housing and parental leave, all of which Western governments feel they can ill afford. Macron for example, is currently, dithering over a promise to extend French maternity care from 16 weeks at high pay to 24. But the costs of a population crisis and an emboldened far right will be far higher – particularly for women with aspirations beyond motherhood, and anyone who doesn’t fit the nativist model of an indigenous, heterosexual family.
Next to that prospect, a patronising French letter about egg-freezing hardly seems so threatening. It is, however, woefully insufficient.
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