Politics
Wednesday February 1, 2006
Germany Leads the World in Childless Women
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By Hilary White
BERLIN, February 1, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - 30% of German women choose not to have children with the figure rising among female graduates to 40% making Germany the world’s leader in childless women. These numbers spurred a contentious debate in the German Bundestag (parliament) earlier this week.
Germany is following the European trend with one of the lowest birth rates in the world, 1.3 births per woman compared with the 2.1 required for a stable population. Statistics show that with the current rates of births and deaths, the German population declines by a third every generation.
"If the birth rate continues to fall, Germans are at risk of dying out," said Harald Michel, the head of the Institute for Applied Demography. He along with other experts is [are] so alarmed at the decline that he believes if the trend is not reversed, not only will Germany and other European countries not be able to support their generous state cradle-to-grave welfare programmes, they will not continue to exist.
Ursula von der Leyen, a gynaecologist and mother of seven is the German family minister, says that unless the birth rate rises, “we will have to turn out the light.”
Debate on the German birth crisis is focusing not on the birth rate itself, however, but on the dearth of spaces available for childcare and on government subsidies for parental leave. No mention of abortion has been made either by von der Leyen’s Christian Democrat party or the Social Democrats. Von der Leyen’s solution was to attempt to force men to take two months leave from work after the birth of a child in order to qualify for state-funded child welfare support.
Germany’s abortion rate has long been among the highest in the world and polls are showing that many young German women accept the feminist proposal that a life spent as a mother is a waste. German women also have children later, delaying motherhood until after university and securing a well-paid job. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel said that men and women are “deeply uncertain” about parenthood
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