Europe's population is aging fast; and immigrants from Africa are waiting in the wings. Anti-immigrant populist parties of the hard right need to find pro-natalist policies that actually work.
This question concerns me a lot. My fear - perhaps even my expectation - is that increasingly right wing parties will attempt to solve it by dropping "without coercion" from "How can hard-right parties persuade native-born young women to have more babies without any coercion?"
The fewer alternatives women have, the less bad child bearing and child rearing looks by comparison. Flipped the other way, there's evidence that educating girls reduces the birthrate. (I don't know whether this research controlled for urban vs rural locations.)
Right wing pro-natalists can see this as clearly as I can, and they tend, overall, not to treat women as full citizens, or even real people. Not all of them, and possibly less so in Europe than in the US, but it's certainly a strand of right wing fantasy about what a better world would look like.
We have the example of Romania (1967-1990) - technically communist rather than right wing - for non-consensual measures to increase childbearing - and Afghanistan for giving women nothing else to do with their lives.
Food for thought. Thanks, Rupert. We can only hope that those winning elections actually feel compelled to actually govern, and govern the entire electorate with democratic values and freedoms for all people in mind. I appreciate that your first listing under further reading is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Maybe part of the problem is that state pension schemes in post industrial economies have become little more than unintentional Ponzi schemes which few politicians are brave enough to acknowledge. Looking just at fertility rates in isolation (live expectancy and quality of life are just as relevant in my view), and pinning social security deficits and mass immigration on the declining birth-rate, will only serve to fuel generational conflict and ultra-nativist sentiments
Good luck with convincing the hard right to engage with feminists and eschew coercion. Here in France, we have already seen them work together with conservative Muslims to sabotage things like sex education in schools.
This question concerns me a lot. My fear - perhaps even my expectation - is that increasingly right wing parties will attempt to solve it by dropping "without coercion" from "How can hard-right parties persuade native-born young women to have more babies without any coercion?"
The fewer alternatives women have, the less bad child bearing and child rearing looks by comparison. Flipped the other way, there's evidence that educating girls reduces the birthrate. (I don't know whether this research controlled for urban vs rural locations.)
Right wing pro-natalists can see this as clearly as I can, and they tend, overall, not to treat women as full citizens, or even real people. Not all of them, and possibly less so in Europe than in the US, but it's certainly a strand of right wing fantasy about what a better world would look like.
We have the example of Romania (1967-1990) - technically communist rather than right wing - for non-consensual measures to increase childbearing - and Afghanistan for giving women nothing else to do with their lives.
Food for thought. Thanks, Rupert. We can only hope that those winning elections actually feel compelled to actually govern, and govern the entire electorate with democratic values and freedoms for all people in mind. I appreciate that your first listing under further reading is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Maybe part of the problem is that state pension schemes in post industrial economies have become little more than unintentional Ponzi schemes which few politicians are brave enough to acknowledge. Looking just at fertility rates in isolation (live expectancy and quality of life are just as relevant in my view), and pinning social security deficits and mass immigration on the declining birth-rate, will only serve to fuel generational conflict and ultra-nativist sentiments
Good luck with convincing the hard right to engage with feminists and eschew coercion. Here in France, we have already seen them work together with conservative Muslims to sabotage things like sex education in schools.