Vilma Fuentes: Motherhood in decline

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the decline in the birth rate In France, this is worrying both authorities and demographic experts. Births have fallen to their lowest level since the end of World War II. The situation is worrying because, while the birth rate is falling, life expectancy is increasing, meaning there will be fewer working people to support the elderly.

The current birth rate is 1.6 percent per couple. This doesn't mean that women give birth to one complete baby and another without part of the legs or all of the arms. The figures simply count births and distribute them among the number of possible existing couples. The statistics are as abstract as they are inhumane.

Before proceeding to create incentives to foster the desire for fatherhood and motherhood, it would be worth starting by asking why the birth rate is declining.

Surveys on this subject provide various answers, more or less decisive, regarding the reasons that lead a couple to reduce the number of children. The reasons vary, of course, from household to household, depending on their geographic location, the couple's age, economic means, religion, financial, intellectual, and other aspirations. A practicing Catholic family will have more offspring than a secular one. A marriage between Muslims will create an even larger family.

Another important factor is sex education. Contraceptive use is more widespread in cities than in the countryside, and in the capital than in the provinces.

Another cause of this decline is the aspiration of many women to achieve professional success, which limits procreation, if not excludes it from their female projects.

Among the reasons for this decline in the birth rate is the refusal of a large part of the male population to care for their children while their wives work. Apparently, without being a generalization, paternal tenderness in France is less than maternal tenderness.

One of the disturbing consequences is population replacement. Indeed, the immigrant population tends to reproduce more than the French population of origin, which, in the long run, would lead to a majority of Arab descendants who adhere to the Muslim religion and have customs different from those of the West; that is, the delegation of women to the domestic sphere, the obligation for women to veil their faces, the possibility for men to marry several wives…

In his 2015 novel, entitled "Submission," which some consider an almost prophetic narrative, writer Michel Houellebecq traces the life of a teacher in a French republic where Islamization is gaining ground and eventually reigns in the educational sphere. The protagonist must decide between converting to Islam and enjoying uncontested prerogatives in his profession or retaining his religion and losing his job at the university. The new religion offers him advantages such as polygamy, but he would be subject to the order imposed by the Muslim fraternity . Houellebecq leaves the possibilities open to his indecisive protagonist. What is clear in this novel is the situation to which women would be subjected: confinement in harems, veiled faces, the total impossibility of an adventure or a professional career.

Houellebecq sets his novel in a special political context, where Muslim brotherhood prevails in the university environment.

In France today, the real danger is the declining birth rate among French people, which leaves the field open to immigrant families who practice the Muslim religion and tend to have higher birth rates than French couples.

As far as I'm concerned, it's clear that my feminine status makes a religion that confines women to the domestic sphere unacceptable to me. Yes to so-called Third World nations, but a definitive no to beliefs where women are subservient.

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