To think France's plan to write to every 29 year old reminding them to breed is patronising nonsense??

[Designless]

Nobody alive is forgetting to do this

A lot of people don't want to because in the modern era it's not necessary and a lot less fun than other stuff

Some people DO want to but can't in which case idk give them the missing tools or funds

But nobody is forgetting

Why does this whole topic seem to bamboozle policymakers so hard?

I got married in France in 2003 and we both had see a doctor. We dutifully toddled off to my gynae and I (but not my future husband mind) was sent off to the lab with a list of blood tests as long as my arm. They stopped this in 2008 apparently, but before then you couldn't get married without a doctor's certificate.

@Designless Surely AI isn’t going to replace everyone?

I was curious after someone mentioned Japan and apparently the labor market there is tight due to a shortage of younger people. So I think that finding a job won’t be hard if the number of young people shrinks.

Some people do actually want kids, though, so if they find out they can’t, then no, that's not a good thing for them personally. Not necessarily bad for society, though.

It might have been helpful to someone like me to know I couldn't freeze my eggs, as the idea never occurred to me then. I was 33 when my DH and I started ttc and I was already infertile and didn't have eggs. (I might not have had any at 29, either, but it would have been helpful to know that.) We adopted in the end.

Were talking about a country where you can't disinherit your kids, and you can be made to financially support your parents. I think it can.

Obviously I realise that this was the reason but I was replying to a post that asserted that NO ONE was forced to have an examination before marriage. This may be an exceptional case but it still shows that it does happen.

Are you guys really just discovering that different countries have different cultures and different set of laws?

If I was French I’d probably be shocked to find out in other countries you can disinherit your kids (I know someone who did in favour of their new wife they married really late in life) and you can just wash your hands of the people who raised you.

Of course there are some situations where a family member does something horrific and doesn’t deserve to be bothered with again

Is there a French version of MN and if so do they clamor to go 'no contact' with their parents as much as this one?

A lot of this isn’t unique to France, in my country (Eastern European one) you also need pre-marital health checks - for some STIs, and a psychiatric assessment to check there’s no reason why you can’t legally marry (eg you might lack the mental capacity to enter into a legal contract). You also can’t disinherit your children.
They also had some moronic adverts to encourage people to have children a while ago - something along the lines of how getting pregnant is like a free boob job as it makes your boobs bigger 🫣
So if you think the French adverts are bad…

Though on the whole Europe does need more people to have more children. Pretty much every country has an ageing population.

And destroy the planet.

All this is about is a panic that brown people are having more kids than white people. The horror of it.

There are too many people in the world already and the fewer children people have the better.

It does, just not among the "right" sort of people.

Birth rates among immigrants drop to national average within generation or so. Birth rates are dropping rapidly worldwide.

Currently, countries like the UK rely on plundering poorer countries for their working age, well educated, amd well off citizens. Like yet another resource to be mined.

The world population needs to drop. The problem is that the wrong sort of people are having kids. We need more intelligent, educated people to have children and fewer of the feckless, uneducated and unemployed.

@igelkott2026 Birth rates are declining globally. The real issue is that people are living longer thanks to modern medicine and improved living conditions. That’s why there’s so many of us.

We can't do anything about the people already here so it's a moot point saying oh we're all living longer oh no old people are causing overpopulation. Old people are a result of humans having too many kids 70+ years ago-so it's their fault not the people that are inconsiderate enough to still be hanging around being alive 😆 And breeding more and more people to look after the next generations elderly would never end. So I think that poster is saying what do you think should happen instead?

We don't want an increasing population, but the world's population will start to drop in a few decades. Some drop isn't a bad thing, but a preciptious drop could be very problematic.

@Firefly1987 I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a shift towards not trying to extend life in the way we do today, I.e., people refusing treatments, in 50-75 years.

Life will be very hard in countries like Japan where the population is predicted to be 40% over-65’s by 2050 and even harder a few decades later.

Can we have a source for that, please?

Anyone else think of the Mouse Paradise experiment? This is how constant population growth starts to slow in wealthy countries. The interesting side effect being the growth being all in poorer countries where women don’t have so many choices so the young people move to fill the gaps.

This the issue with the 'right wing.... they do not realise (nor want too) that poor "uneducated" people can and very often do, produce children that become, so called "intelligent and educated" people?

How about having education systems that help bring people out of poverty and the associated problems?

All the 1000s of people mentioned in the Epstein files? ALL well educated and intelligent.... yeah brilliant people!

I can almost guarantee that 150 to 200years ago this pp ancestors, would have been poor and uneducated.

He said it in a 2023 blog, he wants a "negative child benefit tax" it would affect men and women.

Having children would avoid the tax.

No doubt it will be ignored as "Historical, written when he was a young child"

This is what you vote for when you vote for extremes, like Reform.

Well maybe we need to change how.men and society treat women. They are are the sex that carries children for 9 months gives birth to them and are generally the ones primarily responsible for keeping children alive in their infancy ( and beyond). This makes them very vulnerable physically and economically. All of this while being treated appalling with little support or even respect for the role, from the government, other members of society or even in many cases from the fathers.

Yes of course having children is rewarding for many many women, but it is clear that in the context of a human society across the world that treats vulnerable members appalling that reward is obviously not enough for most women to offset the vulnerability, when they have a choice. You just have to look at the birth rates in countries across the globe when birth control becomes widely available

I don't know the answer but I strongly fear that women are in for a tough time as countries face steeply falling birth rates at a time whwn more and more authoritarian governments are coming to power. To be fair this has pretty much always been the case for women in the countries that never donned the veneer of equal rights for women

Equal rights for women only works in a pragmatic sense if we accept that making a choice to be a mother is more than an individual choice, it has broader consequences. It should therefore confer real societal advantage interms of real respect for the importance of the work along with economic support.

That means accepting that individual women who are more fertile may end up having economically better liveon and having more respect on aversge than if they are not . I know many will dislike that idea but I see no difference beteen being advantaged for being female and fertile or being white, male and born into money. Both are accidents of birth.

The alternative is trying to directly control women's fertility by force and coercion, which many govwenmwnts will prefer to try as simpler.

Writing to women to remind them of thier fertility window will be the the least of it,I am afraid

Sigh

We don't need people to breed more because the economy and society have fundamentally changed

It's ok to let go of old ways

I genuinely don’t understand what you think has changed so much for falling birth rates not to be a problem?

AI will do most jobs and many of the babies being born today will never work. Which is why we need highly skilled, highly educated people to have more babies because statistically the children of highly skilled, highly educated people are much more likely to go on to become highly skilled and highly educated themselves and they can go on to do highly skilled, highly paid jobs that contribute taxes that keep the country running.