France needs babies. During a press conference on 16 January, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, pledged to tackle the scourge of infertility and offered enhanced parental “childbirth leave” as part of his “demographic rearmament” plan to revive the country’s declining birthrate.
While his goals may be commendable, Macron’s rhetoric sounds alarmingly close to that of authoritarian and rightwing populist leaders who have been aggressively pursuing pro-natalist policies in recent years. After all, Vladimir Putin recently urged Russian women to have “eight or more children” as he seeks to reverse the decades of population decline that have only been exacerbated by heavy casualties in Ukraine.
