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I almost never wonder how I’d feel if I were a 29-year-old French woman. I fear the question would lead to dissatisfactions too profound (would I be eating oysters right now? Would my socks be cashmere? Would I know what existentialism meant – no, I mean really know?). This morning, however, I did stop and give it some serious thought: specifically, how would I feel if my government wrote to me, reminding me to have children? To get that letter from childless Macron would be like getting told off about your BMI by a nurse whose BMI is definitely the same as yours, if not greater: on the one hand, it’s none of your business who has kids or what anyone’s BMI is. But on the other, how about we just all keep out of each other’s business? Luckily the letter is going to be sent out by the health ministry, and say what you like about ministries, you can’t criticise their lifestyle choices.
Before you get your panties in a twist, feminists, this letter will be sent to both men and women of the 29-year-old variety, and the government underscored that “fertility is a shared responsibility between women and men” – a statement that is both true and woke (yup, I’m reclaiming “woke” to mean “things I approve”).
All that being said, the pressure on women is unlike that on men, for reasons that stretch into the thousands before you even get to “which one of them has to give birth?”. The age of 29 was presumably chosen symbolically, to flag that 30 is just around the corner, and that’s when you’re supposed to worry about your fertility. It’s an exceedingly cautious cut-off point, and a heavily gendered one, by which I mean, when did you last hear anyone say, “tick tock, tick tock” to a man on the occasion of his 30th birthday?
Naturally, there’s a broader political dimension, some of which applies equally to mothers and fathers. For instance, while you’re unveiling a 16-point plan to tackle low birth rates, why not make the 17th point that if anyone could afford to house themselves, they might be quicker to settle down? Maternity leave, though, or the lack of it, remains quite a her-problem not a him-problem. I made a radio documentary once, years ago, about two adjacent towns, a couple of miles apart, one in France, one in Germany, and their different policies around motherhood. In Germany, mothers would probably not see the inside of their offices again for years. In France, childbirth was expected to take no more time out of your diary than a minibreak with one plane cancellation – which is to say: OK, more than a weekend but certainly not as much as a week. This was a long time ago, but my take-home was “both of these systems are bad”, and hey presto, 15 or maybe 20 years later, both countries have a birthrate “crisis”. Then again, so does the UK, and I’m not wild about the word “crisis”.
Because this debate, as one sustainability professor, François Gemenne, told Sky News, is not just about babies and whether or not there are enough of them (at 1.56 children per woman, they are miles off the 2.1 required for a sustainable population). It’s also about the pensions system, which itself stands in for a wider conversation about the welfare state. And it’s about modern politics and its “obsession with immigration and the fear of being ‘replaced’”, Gemenne concluded.
The obsession with fertility started with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and his staggering motherhood tax breaks (mothers of three are now exempt from tax altogether). This pro-natalist viewpoint was taken up by Elon Musk some years before he went full Trumper, and features worrying arguments about some humans being more valuable than others. If demographics were the problem, if policymakers were really just trying to balance the retired against the working aged, then their orientation towards migrants would be completely different. Countries with low birthrates would be welcoming, and have language lessons, and smiling, and induction days.
In other words, don’t buy it, French 29-year-olds: you’re being used as pawns in the creation of a Great Replacement narrative. That’s the worst reason ever to start a family.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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