A new French exception? Having more babies William Pfaff | Tribune Media Services | January 29, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/29/opinion/edpfaff.php Thirty years ago, the government of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was urging the French to have "un troisième enfant pour la France!" But it is only now that they have taken the advice. The national statistics agency says that in 2006 France had the highest birthrate in Europe. The average number of births by women of fertile age was slightly more than two. Thus France becomes one of the two European Union states with a positive birthrate; Ireland is the other. The contrast with their neighbors is very marked. Germany, Italy and Spain all have birthrates under 1.4. The rates in the new EU members, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and even Roman Catholic Poland, are below 1.3. French life expectancy in 2005 was also the highest in Europe, at 84 for women and 77 for men, and it increased last year by three and a half months for women and nearly five months for men. Debate over the EU's future has consistently questioned its ability to finance social services at their present level. Immigration policy has in recent years assumed population decline. Decline has been the trend since the postwar baby boom. The approach of retirement age for the postwar generation, means a declining number of people in the active workforce to make the retirement and health insurance contributions necessary to support the retired. Thus Europeans have been told that high rates of immigration are essential to support the European welfare state. There is irony in this, since the demagogic anti-immigration argument has been that immigrants come to Western Europe to take advantage of its generous social benefits. They actually are needed in the active labor force to keep welfare systems afloat. If the new French population trend should presage rising birthrates elsewhere, much angst might lift. However, this may be another "French exception." The increase in French births seems not to be disproportionately due to immigrant births, the conventional inference, but that the native-born are having more babies. This can't be proven by statistics since, in the name of French "égalité," French statistics do not take account of race or national origin. But children are thick on the streets of the most prosperous quarters of Paris. The city's fashionable Luxembourg and Monceau gardens on Sundays are full of young families with double strollers and toddlers dashing about. My children's school friends are having three and four children or more. It is not just young mothers who are concerned. The average birth age now is 30. Frenchwomen are more likely to work than elsewhere in Europe, but even those with advanced degrees, graduates of the so- called Grandes Écoles, who go into privileged jobs, are having large families. Ségolène Royal, the Socialist presidential candidate, with four children, is exceptional only in that she and her "companion" never married. And she is not that much of an exception. The number of marriages fell from 416,500 in 1972 to 268,100 last year, but the number of civil partnerships a legal alliance meant originally for homosexual couples, which has proven extremely popular among heterosexuals living in concubinage has gone from some 6,000 to over 60,000 in six years. Birth records no longer note legitimacy of birth. A report of the National Assembly, chaired by the spokeswoman of the conservative UMP party, said that the choice between marriage and civil union seems to have no great impact on family life: which is to say that while the number of divorces is up, the civil union is not noticeably more unstable than marriage. A factor in the increasing number of children is undoubtedly France's generous social legislation, giving long maternity leaves, with assured return to work with posts and seniority intact. Governments with negative birthrates have investigated the French system, and Germany has just introduced new allowances for parents. "New Labour" introduced such measures in 2001 and Britain had its highest birthrate in 13 years last year. Another possible birth incentive in France, which may not be copied elsewhere, is its 35-hour workweek. It has been suggested that the French have so much leisure now that they have found nothing more interesting to do with it than have babies, combining fun with demographic patriotism.
