Gov. to middle-class women: Have more kids!

An article in an alternative British Columbian newspaper highlights the ways in which the rhetoric changes when government policy is applied to helping, or stopping, reproduction.

Contradictory messages about women's fertility are breeding like rabbits this week. In largely-Catholic Brazil, the government is subsidizing birth control pills so poor women can afford the contraceptive, despite a recent visit by Pope Benedict XVI, who mainly used his time to condemn abortion, contraception and sex outside marriage. In China, officials are rounding up rural, pregnant women and conducting forced abortions to enforce the mandatory one child policy.

In Canada, on the other hand, I'm the problem. Thirty-something. Childless. And a threat to Canada's future economic well being. The nation's fertility rate has plummeted to 1.53 children per woman, and Maclean's has published the latest cry of alarm ...

You don't have to read much between the lines to discern the big class bias behind all of this hand wringing. Stats actually show that young, unmarried, uneducated, non-professional women are doing just fine in the baby department. The elitist worry seems to be that the "right" kind of woman is forgoing kids. Read: middle class and up.

The article goes on to talk about how the government discussion over fertility rates is way, way different from that of real women who have to make the decision.

[LINK]

And this is no surprise. WebMD reports that people who have kids spend less time dedicated to exercise. What did surprise me is that men's exercise levels dropped more than women's, post-baby:

Men's activity levels declined more than women's as they became parents, Hull also found. That could be because they were more active than women at the start of the two-year study, he says.

"Men who stayed childless lost about 50 minutes a week in activity [from study start to end]," he says. "Men who became parents lost 4.5 hours a week. Women who stayed childless lost about 20 minutes a week. Women who became parents lost an hour and 20 minutes a week."

[LINK]

Lastly, Catholic World News reports that Ireland is the latest European country to report a precipitous decline in households sporting tots:

"The big story recorded by the latest Census isn't so much the decline of the traditional family, as the enormous rise in households without children," argues the Iona Institute's David Quinn.

[LINK]