According to the French government, France is facing a huge challenge. The birthrate has been in decline for a decade now, but in 2023 it was down by 7% on the previous year. In response, the president, Emmanuel Macron, has announced a plan for what he calls “demographic rearmament” including fertility testing for those aged 25. Besides the war-like rhetoric that treats a high birthrate as a way for France to compete internationally, this discussion of people’s bodies as part of a national plan makes me queasy.
Such a utilitarian view of the birthrate not only puts an unhelpful burden on the shoulders of all French people of childbearing age, but is an offensive intrusion in to our intimate lives and personal choices. At 46, Macron himself has chosen not to be a father – why can’t he let everyone else make their own choices?
The number of people who start planning to have children at 25 is extremely low; the average age at which French women give birth is 31. Instead of encouraging prejudices about declining fertility and imposing tests on people who may not even be thinking about having children, the president should be asking himself whether people are able to have as many children as they would like.
France’s current fertility rate is 1.7 children per woman, but a close look at polling on people’s aspirations is revealing: the vast majority think the ideal family configuration is to have two children. And more people would prefer to have three than one. So we can tell that people would like to have more children than they currently have; there is no proof that they are not doing so because of their fertility levels.
Focusing on biology rather than on the political context in which people decide whether they can or can’t plan for a future with children is a misrepresentation. How can people feel relaxed about raising children in a climate of economic insecurity combined with the severe deterioration of public services, including hospitals and schools? The first step in any national plan should be to commit to maintaining spending on childcare and restoring the quality of state schools instead of undermining it.
Lecturing people about their declining fertility without addressing structural patriarchy is completely missing the point. Although women on average are more highly educated than men, we still earn less and face far more obstacles to career progress when we become mothers. In heterosexual couples, women carry 70% of the burden of domestic work, which has to be a disincentive to multiple pregnancies. So the priority is to start an equality campaign and allocate massive resources for it.
It took Macron four years to finally allow women to access assisted reproductive technology, which LGBTQ+ campaigners had demanded ever since same-sex marriage was legalised in 2013. The delay meant many women were denied the chance to become mothers.
Macron’s statements echo those of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s post-fascist prime minister. She has recently made boosting the “Italian” birthrate a patriotic duty to offset “ethnic replacement”, which is nothing but a coded way of encouraging a white supremacist agenda.
Promoting the French birthrate while in parallel enacting a hardline new anti-immigrant law is part of a similar ideological incoherence. How can we fail to see the contradiction between Macron’s words now and how he has repeatedly blamed the high birthrate of African women for their continent’s poverty?
And how can we not recall that French women of colour have also been lectured about their bodily autonomy? Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean, is one of the few French regions to have experienced a recent birthrate surge. However, in Mayotte, where women are overwhelmingly black, this is not seen as an asset but a problem – so much so that the regional health authority has proposed offering sterilisation to young women. The policy of targeting poor women’s fertility has a deeply troubling antecedent in a colonial scandal in Réunion (another French territory in the Indian Ocean) in the early 1970s, when hundreds of women were revealed to have been unwittingly sterilised or had their pregnancies forcibly aborted. At a time when abortion was still illegal in (white)France, the perpetrators enjoyed an incredible degree of leniency.
Clearly, some pregnancies are unwanted and dangerous, others are celebrated. Non-white parents from the banlieues can be insulted and stigmatised by a government minister as “neglectful” people who have no “authority” when their too numerous children rise up after yet another episode of police brutality. White parents, however, are encouraged by the same minister to have more children. And guess who will be taking care of the cherished new progeny when their professional parents go out to work? Immigrant women of colour always find their qualities as nannies much in demand when it comes to the offspring of the middle classes.
Children are not products at the disposal of the nation. The state should give every French citizen the help they need to decide what is best for them – but at all times guarantee their freedom of choice.
Rokhaya Diallo is a Guardian Europe columnist
