Let’s admit that for a Quebecer, the current debate in France on postponing the retirement age from 62 to 64 may seem distant. But there is one aspect for which it deserves our full attention.
As economists have pointed out, if the question of the balance of pension schemes arises so acutely in our countries, it is because the proportion between working people and pensioners has radically changed. If, in 1960, there were four active people in France to pay for the retirement of a retiree, today there are only 1.7. The longer the lifespan of citizens has lengthened, the more the birth rate has declined.
Not so long ago, France boasted of having the best birth rate in Europe. However, the country has just discovered with astonishment that it has never been so low since 1946. If it has not yet reached the rates of Germany or Italy, it nevertheless seems that it is be finished with the French exception.
Of course, as everywhere, this fall in the birth rate is largely due to the massive entry of women into the labor market and the long years of study which lead them to postpone the arrival of their first child. Of this, no one will complain. Only the poor are rich in their children, it is well known. But one would have to be deaf and blind not to see how radically the discourse on the birth rate has changed in recent years.
Victor Hugo wanted “to live in the city of the living / only in a house that a rumor of children / always makes lively and mad”. Postmodern society continues to view the child today as a burden. Isn’t that what you have to believe when hearing some people describe the hell that the responsibility of a family would have been for our parents? While the slogans ” no kids ” and ” childfree ” abound on social networks, it is up to who would redouble their radicalism to break “the taboo of motherhood” and put an end to the “injunction to be a mother”. As if it were not normal that, without imposing anything on anyone, a healthy society simply wishes to reproduce itself.
In a world of every man for himself, toddlers are no longer popular. Even they bother. Here they are described as hyperactive, suffering from ADHD or other “autism spectrum disorder”. Sick or not, they most often remain a problem. This is why large “progressive” companies offer their employees to freeze their eggs so that they do not have the indelicacy to burden themselves with a little brat in full career.
In 10 years, the number of vasectomies (celebrated on the Internet with the hashtag “couic couic hooray!” ») would have been multiplied by 10 in France. While the slightest obstacle to abortion brings millions of people to the streets—often with good reason—the very idea of finding ways to help families have the second or third child they dream of triggers the ire of some media.
It is not surprising that those who dream of erasing all distinctions between the sexes consider motherhood with perplexity. Some ecologists do not hesitate to openly consider children as a nuisance by reducing them (after cattle) to the amount of CO2 they emit. No less than 58.6 tonnes on average per year, they say with the chilling precision of an entomologist dissecting a butterfly. What is an ecology worth that no longer marvels at the smile of a child?
Especially since this neo-Malthusianism is based on the absurd belief that we live in a closed universe with resources defined once and for all. This is what prehistoric men believed before they mastered fire, those of the Middle Ages before the steam engine, and ourselves before the computer revolution. This is also what the famous Club of Rome believed in the 1970s, which predicted the depletion of oil resources at the dawn of the 2000s and the collapse of the system under the weight of galloping demography. In 1968, based on the same arguments, the eminent professor Paul R. Ehrlich, of Stanford University, had considered inevitable a mass famine in the 1980s. Forty years later, hunger has never known a such a setback in the history of mankind.
Moreover, on a global scale, “the population explosion is behind us,” says demographer Hervé Le Bras. In some countries, the baby crash even succeeded the baby boom. In this context — and given the challenge posed to a welfare state by solidarity between generations — would it not be normal for the countries most affected to consider adopting pro-natalist policies? If only to keep their population levels afloat?
It was the writer GK Chesterton who described the arrival of a child as the first form of “openness to the other”, because no one ever knows what the little one to come will look like. We are already told of a world without men or women. Imagine the boredom of a world without children!