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The EU's baby blues
Birth rates in the European Union are falling fast.

In the first of a series about motherhood and the role of the state in encouraging couples to have more children, the BBC News website's Clare Murphy asks why governments are so concerned about the size of their populations.

William The Conqueror was counting people nearly 1,000 years ago, and his European descendants are still at it. Small, today's politicians contend, isn't beautiful.

Europe's working-age population is shrinking as fertility rates decline. In a fit of gloom, one German minister recently warned of the country "turning the light out" if its birth rate did not pick up.

Efforts to encourage couples to breed have a chequered history and, for many, recall fascist pasts. Mussolini heavily taxed single men in his Battle for Births, Hitler awarded medals to women with large families in his quest for a superior German race.

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The series now has articles on Italy and Germany.

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In a fit of gloom, one German minister recently warned of the country "turning the light out" if its birth rate did not pick up.

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From the article:

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Increasing immigration is, in theory, one option for Europe, but most agree it is politically unfeasible in the current climate.

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We do have to remember that technology means fewer hours are needed to produce goods...

I think there is a population problem in terms of people who would like to have children and don't have the economic and social situation to do so. I never wanted children, but I know people, especially younger and more fertile people, who would like to reproduce if they had a decent job and some security.

[ 28 March 2006: Message edited by: lagatta ]

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Carter, much as I agree with les mouvements des sans-papier, many students of this issues don't think immigration alone can solve this problem (if it is a problem?) as immigrants' family sizes soon become equal to those in the host country.

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I know people, especially younger and more fertile people, who would like to reproduce if they had a decent job and some security.

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Originally posted by Boom Boom:
I think the use of the expression "turning the light out" in that BBC article meant that with nothing else to do, the population would start making babies. Remember the baby boom nine months after the great power blackout in New York City a few decades ago?

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Babies are cute, and children are ok, but people forget: they just grow up and become ... other people!

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Originally posted by Transplant:

"It was hell," recalls a former child.

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Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

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That's always good, but I like this one:

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If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

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That's worthy of Alan Bennett.

Edit:

Churchill is supposed to have said "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."

I think I have two on my shelf, and this is a Good Thing.

[ 28 March 2006: Message edited by: 'lance ]

I've said this before (sorry), but as a small defence of the man: he wrote a number of essays about American literature in the late 1940s that were so fine, I think. There was a several-parter on Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom that is the best commentary on that novel that I've ever read.

Not highly quotable, though. The man really wasn't all that pithy.

[ 28 March 2006: Message edited by: skdadl ]

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Originally posted by 'lance:
I'm sure he inspired many people to be pithy, though.

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Originally posted by skdadl:

Thimone firtht among them, I thould think.

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Note her development of the concept of social construction of sex (what one would now refer to as gender).

According to this, it wasn't very happy for Algren, at least.

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But it is clear now that Sartre and Beauvoir did not simply have a long-term relationship supplemented by independent affairs with other people. The affairs with other people formed the very basis of their relationship. The swapping and the sharing and the mimicking, the memoir- and novel-writing, right down to the interviews and the published letters and the duelling estates, was the stuff and substance of their “marriage.” This was how they slept with each other after they stopped sleeping with each other. The third parties were, in effect, prostheses, marital aids, and, when they discovered how they were being used, they reacted, like Bianca Bienenfeld, with the fury of the betrayed. Algren never forgave Beauvoir for concealing Sartre’s affair with Vanetti from him: when her books appeared in English translation, he reviewed them, and they are reviews from hell.

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Algren started out in a circle of proletarian writers, centred around Dubuque, Iowa and Moberly, Missouri. He couldn't settle down, as most of them had. Started to ride the rails. Lucky thing he did discover Division Street in Chicago. I don't know about the fling with Simone however. (Whoa boy . . . stop now . . . no, I did settle down.)
Yes, I'm sure you have de Beauvoir all figured out.) Sorry for the interruption. Nelson must have been entirely different from men today. More open, sensitive and unlike those chauvinists you know.

[ 28 March 2006: Message edited by: goyanamasu ]

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Originally posted by 'lance:
What I want to know is, what's the French for "thufferin' thuccotash"?

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Sapristi d'saucisse.

Truly, I'm sorry to hear that. I thought that they had both found a happy moment later in life.

[ 28 March 2006: Message edited by: skdadl ]

Back in the day, I did a month long project that involved designing what I thought was a great project. I was quite proud. I went up in front of the class to defend my work and rambled (I thought intelligently) on for a few minutes. Then came questions.

One senior professor asked witheringly if I, in fact, understood the irony behind a project titled a "Centre for the Study of Existentialism".

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Originally posted by brebis noire:
I like to think that a lot of us are now smartre than Sartre.

]/LAME ATTEMPT

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rich/middle class people are less wanting to have children because it means giving up material wealth (IOW, they'd rather have a new LCD TV rather than a child to take care of). In a society of greed and materialism, sacrifice means nothing.

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I see. Because I don't want kids, I'm selfish and materialistic. That's a pretty offensive generalization. What exactly do you mean by "sacrifice means nothing"? Isn't not having kids a sacrifice, or does that not fit into the parents-as-selfless-heroes image?

link

To state the thesis very briefly (and probably mess it up):

Birthrates are declining, but not among conservative households. Rather, families that have 3,4 or 5 or more children are more likely to be conservative, and it only takes a small number of such families to be more represented in the next generation (for example, following the Second World War, around 10% of women gave birth to some 25% of babyboomers).

Conservative families where the woman's role is relegated to rearing children are better suited to producing many children (specialisation of labour and all that), and religious values give a greater motivation to produce more children in the first place.

This basic reality is what ultimately gave rise to male-headed households (and societies).

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Originally posted by Boom Boom:
I think the use of the expression "turning the light out" in that BBC article meant that with nothing else to do, the population would start making babies.

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Originally posted by Aristotleded24:
Also, given the problems our population is causing for the environment, it's time our population started to drop. Declining birth rates is the most humane way of accomplishing this.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
Children: Bah! Humbug!

Babies are cute, and children are ok, but people forget: they just grow up and become ... other people!

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And that, of course, inevitably leads to this.

[ 28 March 2006: Message edited by: Sven ]

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Originally posted by Jingles:
I see. Because I don't want kids, I'm selfish and materialistic. That's a pretty offensive generalization. What exactly do you mean by "sacrifice means nothing"? Isn't not having kids a sacrifice, or does that not fit into the parents-as-selfless-heroes image?

Personally, I made a very conscious decision not to breed (yes, I know many find that characterization offensive, but that is what it is). There are over 6 billion people in the world, and there is (perhaps unfortunately for the rest of the natural world) no chance of our immediate extinction. So all this whining over low birthrates really comes down to the lowest sort of racism.

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I can definitely see why Euhemeros' comment elicited this response, Jingles. My partner and I made a conscious decision to be child-free (not “childless”). The decision was, largely, due to lifestyle. We like our lifestyle of not having to care for any kids. We work long hours, like to travel and love the peace and quite of home, all of which are much more difficult with kids.

In a very real sense it selfish to make that decision (and I use that term descriptively, not judgmentally). I can live the life I want and I don’t have to fit into any pre-determined mold of being a couple with 2.2 children.

Being child-free is not, however, necessarily “materialistic”. It may be for some, but it’s not necessarily the case. May child-free couples simply want a quiet life (or some other non-material reason for making the decision they have made). And, if a couple makes a decision based in part (or in whole, for that matter) for material reasons, what’s the problem with that?

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Originally posted by Sven:
Finally, the thing that was implied in (or at least I inferred it from) Euhemeros' post was an assertion of an unstated obligation to humanity to reproduce. That I don’t get at all (particularly given the huge (and growing) human population globally). Even if the population wasn’t growing and humans eventually died out, is that necessarily a thing to avoid? I’m not sure that it is.

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Personally, I made a very conscious decision not to breed (yes, I know many find that characterization offensive, but that is what it is). There are over 6 billion people in the world, and there is (perhaps unfortunately for the rest of the natural world) no chance of our immediate extinction. So all this whining over low birthrates really comes down to the lowest sort of racism.

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Don't you feel good about yourself now? The simple fact is that you reproduce, or your society diminishes. Someone said above that Conservative patriarchs are the ones with larger families and one would assume that they pass these 'values' on to their children; perhaps this is why patriarchy and conservativism will eventually win out.