The new statistics published on the birth rate in France confirm the negative trend observed in recent years. In response, President Emmanuel Macron unveiled the outlines of his reforms, announced at the beginning of the year, which he believes will reverse the trend.
The latest figures published for March 2024 show that this is the 22nd consecutive month in which the birth rate has fallen compared with the same month the previous year. The demographic rearmament promised by Macron at his January press conference is becoming more urgent than ever.
In a major interview with the women’s magazine ELLE, the president defended his plan for ‘birth leave,’ due to come into force in August 2025. The new birth leave will begin at the end of the (approximately three-month-long) maternity and paternity leave provided for when the child is born, which will remain unchanged. It is intended to replace ‘parental leave’, which lasts for one year but can be renewed twice for a total of three years. In January, Macron lamented the fact that this duration “keeps a lot of women out of the labour market”—it is mainly mothers who currently use it. The new scheme is to be limited to six months and shared equally between the father and mother—three months each. Parents will be paid “50% of their salary,” up to a maximum of €1,900. The president emphasised the advantage of much higher pay than for current parental leave, which is set at €429.
The provisions of the new leave fall short of the recommendations made by the two MPs in charge of the report that preceded the introduction of the reform. The two MPs, from the Socialist Party and Renaissance, Emmanuel Macron’s party, recommended one year’s leave, and compensation at 67% of salary.
The president’s statements were greeted with a degree of scepticism by both family associations and childcare professionals. Indeed, the new childbirth leave seems to have been designed primarily to meet ideological imperatives—enabling women to return to the labour market more quickly, promoting equality between men and women in childcare—rather than to make life easier for families and meet their practical needs.
Pascale Morinière, President of the Confédération nationale des Associations Familiales Catholiques, is critical of a reform that “hijacks” family policy to make it an instrument in the fight for gender equality. Morinière, who is also a doctor, believes that this reform risks having exactly the opposite effect to that intended. When birth leave expires, parents will be offered nothing more in the way of childcare. As a result, “if the possibility of stopping work is removed, families will decide whether to postpone a birth or leave the labour market. The birth rate will not recover.”
In the interview published in ELLE, Emmanuel Macron touched on other aspects of his family policy. Concerned about the galloping growth in single-parent families, mainly made up of single women who have to look after children, he said he was in favour of a “duty of access” for fathers. The head of state believes that “there must be not just a right but a duty to visit, a duty to monitor, educate, and pursue the parental project beyond the [dissolution of the] couple.” Associations that support lone mothers welcome this new awareness of the difficulties faced by millions of women in bringing up their children alone. Some feminist activists are opposed to the idea of a father’s “duty of access,” pointing out that in practice, mothers have to protect themselves from the violence of failing fathers: “Women need money and rights, not a man,” says Auriane Dupuy of the Génération Féministe movement.
On the Right, many people condemn this discovery of the importance of the father by a man who has, in previous years, done everything to erase it, especially with the introduction of medically-assisted procreation for female couples. “A child who never sees his father is a child who feels abandoned and whose emotional and educational development is not the same. I’m sure we need a father, a mother, a loving family,” the president dared to assert. This statement does not go down well coming from a man who calmly explained a few years ago that a father was not always a male.
Macron’s belated discovery of the importance of the father’s role is not without ulterior motives: he is being blamed for the ‘bad role’ in the unstable balance of French families, whereas reality proves that situations are often infinitely more complex. In 75% of cases, it is women who file for divorce. Everything in the current French legal system is designed to get rid of the father, as the filmmaker Raphaël Delpard reminds us in his 2019 essay Le Combat des pères. It is therefore somewhat pointless to criticise fathers for their lack of involvement in the upbringing of children.
Finally, Macron addressed the issues of fertility and menopause in his interview with ELLE journalists. On the subject of fertility, he explained that he was concerned about the gap that exists in France between the fertility rate (1.8) and the rate of desire for children (around 2.3). He wants to introduce a “fertility check-up” around the age of 20—to be offered to everyone and reimbursed by the health insurance scheme—in order to “establish a complete assessment, spectrogram, (or) ovarian reserve.” A technical and medical approach that overlooks all the other existing obstacles to the birth rate: lack of promotion of a genuine family culture among young people of childbearing age, as well as economic and social barriers.
On the subject of menopause, he announced his intention to launch a parliamentary mission to take stock of “current care provision” and “the difficulties encountered by women in terms of information and follow-up.” These proposals were greeted with a few sarcastic remarks, as if menopause were a social evil that could be solved by public spending rather than a natural phenomenon.
With just one month to go before the European elections, Macron’s pro-family demonstration has, on the whole, been unconvincing. The president’s fluctuations in this area are too great for any credit to be given to his sudden interest in the issue. Then there’s the political calculation, as Europe 1 points out: his stylistic exercise in the columns of ELLE was primarily intended to appeal to the female electorate, while polls show that 60 out of every 100 voters who would consider switching from Macron to the socialist Raphaël Glucksmann are women. In the president’s mind, France’s birth rate remains an adjustment variable.
From Birth Leave to Menopause, Macron’s Opportunist Family Policy
Emmanuel Macron
Photo: Ludovic MARIN / AFP
The new statistics published on the birth rate in France confirm the negative trend observed in recent years. In response, President Emmanuel Macron unveiled the outlines of his reforms, announced at the beginning of the year, which he believes will reverse the trend.
The latest figures published for March 2024 show that this is the 22nd consecutive month in which the birth rate has fallen compared with the same month the previous year. The demographic rearmament promised by Macron at his January press conference is becoming more urgent than ever.
In a major interview with the women’s magazine ELLE, the president defended his plan for ‘birth leave,’ due to come into force in August 2025. The new birth leave will begin at the end of the (approximately three-month-long) maternity and paternity leave provided for when the child is born, which will remain unchanged. It is intended to replace ‘parental leave’, which lasts for one year but can be renewed twice for a total of three years. In January, Macron lamented the fact that this duration “keeps a lot of women out of the labour market”—it is mainly mothers who currently use it. The new scheme is to be limited to six months and shared equally between the father and mother—three months each. Parents will be paid “50% of their salary,” up to a maximum of €1,900. The president emphasised the advantage of much higher pay than for current parental leave, which is set at €429.
The provisions of the new leave fall short of the recommendations made by the two MPs in charge of the report that preceded the introduction of the reform. The two MPs, from the Socialist Party and Renaissance, Emmanuel Macron’s party, recommended one year’s leave, and compensation at 67% of salary.
The president’s statements were greeted with a degree of scepticism by both family associations and childcare professionals. Indeed, the new childbirth leave seems to have been designed primarily to meet ideological imperatives—enabling women to return to the labour market more quickly, promoting equality between men and women in childcare—rather than to make life easier for families and meet their practical needs.
Pascale Morinière, President of the Confédération nationale des Associations Familiales Catholiques, is critical of a reform that “hijacks” family policy to make it an instrument in the fight for gender equality. Morinière, who is also a doctor, believes that this reform risks having exactly the opposite effect to that intended. When birth leave expires, parents will be offered nothing more in the way of childcare. As a result, “if the possibility of stopping work is removed, families will decide whether to postpone a birth or leave the labour market. The birth rate will not recover.”
In the interview published in ELLE, Emmanuel Macron touched on other aspects of his family policy. Concerned about the galloping growth in single-parent families, mainly made up of single women who have to look after children, he said he was in favour of a “duty of access” for fathers. The head of state believes that “there must be not just a right but a duty to visit, a duty to monitor, educate, and pursue the parental project beyond the [dissolution of the] couple.” Associations that support lone mothers welcome this new awareness of the difficulties faced by millions of women in bringing up their children alone. Some feminist activists are opposed to the idea of a father’s “duty of access,” pointing out that in practice, mothers have to protect themselves from the violence of failing fathers: “Women need money and rights, not a man,” says Auriane Dupuy of the Génération Féministe movement.
On the Right, many people condemn this discovery of the importance of the father by a man who has, in previous years, done everything to erase it, especially with the introduction of medically-assisted procreation for female couples. “A child who never sees his father is a child who feels abandoned and whose emotional and educational development is not the same. I’m sure we need a father, a mother, a loving family,” the president dared to assert. This statement does not go down well coming from a man who calmly explained a few years ago that a father was not always a male.
Macron’s belated discovery of the importance of the father’s role is not without ulterior motives: he is being blamed for the ‘bad role’ in the unstable balance of French families, whereas reality proves that situations are often infinitely more complex. In 75% of cases, it is women who file for divorce. Everything in the current French legal system is designed to get rid of the father, as the filmmaker Raphaël Delpard reminds us in his 2019 essay Le Combat des pères. It is therefore somewhat pointless to criticise fathers for their lack of involvement in the upbringing of children.
Finally, Macron addressed the issues of fertility and menopause in his interview with ELLE journalists. On the subject of fertility, he explained that he was concerned about the gap that exists in France between the fertility rate (1.8) and the rate of desire for children (around 2.3). He wants to introduce a “fertility check-up” around the age of 20—to be offered to everyone and reimbursed by the health insurance scheme—in order to “establish a complete assessment, spectrogram, (or) ovarian reserve.” A technical and medical approach that overlooks all the other existing obstacles to the birth rate: lack of promotion of a genuine family culture among young people of childbearing age, as well as economic and social barriers.
On the subject of menopause, he announced his intention to launch a parliamentary mission to take stock of “current care provision” and “the difficulties encountered by women in terms of information and follow-up.” These proposals were greeted with a few sarcastic remarks, as if menopause were a social evil that could be solved by public spending rather than a natural phenomenon.
With just one month to go before the European elections, Macron’s pro-family demonstration has, on the whole, been unconvincing. The president’s fluctuations in this area are too great for any credit to be given to his sudden interest in the issue. Then there’s the political calculation, as Europe 1 points out: his stylistic exercise in the columns of ELLE was primarily intended to appeal to the female electorate, while polls show that 60 out of every 100 voters who would consider switching from Macron to the socialist Raphaël Glucksmann are women. In the president’s mind, France’s birth rate remains an adjustment variable.
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