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Adventurer
Joined: 28 Jan 2006
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 Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 8:38 am Post subject: France claims EU fertility crown |
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France claims EU fertility crown
By Caroline Wyatt
BBC correspondent in Paris
Would-be president Segolene Royal has championed mothers' rights
France says it has now probably overtaken Ireland as Europe's most fertile country, with French women having an average of two children each.
Irish women have 1.9 children each, with the European average at 1.5.
The French birth rate has been growing steadily and has reached its highest level for 25 years.
Cheap childcare
The growth in the birth rate here over the past 25 years may well be thanks to successive governments' family-friendly policies.
The French state tries to make it easy for women to work and have children, rather than having to choose between the two.
Most French women can take time off from their jobs without too much financial loss, while childcare is cheap and generally good.
[I guess Harper should think about investing in similar policies otherwise Canada will have to get more and more immigrants. What is he doing to promote daycare and more Canadians to have children? The Italians might need something like this because they are at the bottom.]]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6268251.stm |
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Junior
Joined: 18 Nov 2005
Location: the eye
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| Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 6:32 pm Post subject: |
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The people having all the babies there are muslims.
timebomb. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 6:39 pm Post subject: |
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| Junior wrote: |
The people having all the babies there are muslims.
timebomb. |
Haha! I knew before I read your post that you were going to say exactly that!  |
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manlyboy
Joined: 01 Aug 2004
Location: Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
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| Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 9:00 pm Post subject: |
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That's the first time ever I've heard that the French birth rate is as high as 2.0, and that only 1/5th of those are to immigrants. Statistics I've been seeing repeatedly from other sources put the birth rate at around 1.8, and that as many as 1/3rd of those are to immigrants. Meaning that if you take out the immigrant contribution, French women are on par with their Italian counterparts, and the government has absolutely nothing to feel "smug" about.
Could there be some statistical spin going on here?
| Quote: |
| The strong French birth rate is evident even on the streets of the capital, where it is not unusual to see a woman pushing a pram while trying to control another child or two. |
Is this for real? Can someone who's spent a fair amount of time in Paris back that up? Because when I was there for a week in '04 I saw nothing of the kind. The most striking demographic trend I noticed was that night time out and about in the suburbs felt a lot more like North Africa than it did Gay Paree. |
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cbclark4
Joined: 20 Aug 2006
Location: Masan
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SPINOZA
Joined: 10 Jun 2005
Location: $eoul
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 12:38 am Post subject: |
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| Recently, the French government even increased a special one-year allowance to 1,000 euros (�659) a month paid to mothers who give up work for the year in order to have their third child. |
Good god, that's peanuts. And to have a THIRD child??
Women are to be paid at least double that if white chicks are to have more nippers. Money talks.
And yes, French birth rates being what they is clearly distorted if one-fifth of new-borns aren't, you know, erm......Frrrrench???. |
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Adventurer
Joined: 28 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 6:22 am Post subject: |
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| Junior wrote: |
The people having all the babies there are muslims.
timebomb. |
That isn't what the article says and Britain has plenty of Muslims and is quite far behind France it seems. The article would have mentioned that if it was only due to the North Africans. |
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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 6:26 am Post subject: |
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I'll be as diplomatic as possible.
I have seen evidence that muslims are providing the 'baby boost' in France, from Mark Steyn's book America Alone. Now, I know that you all think he fabricated those stats, so, I would like it if perhaps someone could provide evidence that he is wrong. In other words, I would like to see evidence that if the muslim population was removed, France would still have a birthrate above the Southern Europe average of 1.4..
I have done some minor google searching of this, and it would seem that the right-wing types quote stats that you would all disagree with. But I do not see other stats being presented. |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 6:29 am Post subject: |
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| Creches, tax-breaks, maternity leave....socialism in action! |
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Adventurer
Joined: 28 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 7:12 am Post subject: |
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| BJWD wrote: |
I'll be as diplomatic as possible.
I have seen evidence that muslims are providing the 'baby boost' in France, from Mark Steyn's book America Alone. Now, I know that you all think he fabricated those stats, so, I would like it if perhaps someone could provide evidence that he is wrong. In other words, I would like to see evidence that if the muslim population was removed, France would still have a birthrate above the Southern Europe average of 1.4..
I have done some minor google searching of this, and it would seem that the right-wing types quote stats that you would all disagree with. But I do not see other stats being presented. |
Well, Britain has millions of Indian and Pakistani Muslims. Why are they behind? Do you know what the rate is for Euro-Francophones? The Muslims are 5% of the French population. Are their numbers enough to make them the winner by far? |
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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 7:55 am Post subject: |
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They are between 6-9%, depending on who you talk to (6.3 from the left, 9 from the right).
Anyhow, I don't want to argue this again. Here is the evidence I have seen. Kindly post counter evidence and we can be done with it. Ok?
| Quote: |
Is France on the way to becoming an Islamic state?
By Barbara Amiel
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 26/01/2004
France, wrote Luigi Barzini, wouldn't be the great and endearing country that it is, la lumi�re du monde, if its quarrelsome people had not been "moulded down the centuries by antagonisms and tensions between tribes, clans, cliques, classes, coteries, guilds, camarillas, sects, parties, factions, regions..." The French are ever at the barricades.
Last week the barricades were at the prime minister's office, the Matignon, where the government was discussing the awkward business of France's proposed new law designed to ban the Muslim headscarf from schools. The Bill, portentously named "Application of the Principle of Secularity", will go to the National Assembly on Wednesday, with a peppy addition to ban beards from schools as well.
Dominique de Villepin, the foreign minister, gravely explained that the law is not aimed at any particular minority, community or religion, though there is, he said, some difficulty in making the essential tolerance of it clear to Arab countries.
advertisement
Domenica Perben, the justice minister, felt the whole thrust of the issue revolved around the equality of men and women - which clears up why the French may be forcibly shaving prematurely mature Sikh schoolboys: they are a gender offset for de-scarfed female Muslims.
France is facing the problem that dare not speak its name. Though French law prohibits the census from any reference to ethnic background or religion, many demographers estimate that as much as 20-30 per cent of the population under 25 is now Muslim. The streets, the traditional haunt of younger people, now belong to Muslim youths. In France, the phrase "les jeunes" is a politically correct way of referring to young Muslims.
Given current birth rates, it is not impossible that in 25 years France will have a Muslim majority. The consequences are dynamic: is it possible that secular France might become an Islamic state?
The situation is not dissimilar elsewhere in the EU. Europeans may at some young point in the 21st century have to decide whether they wish to retain the diluted but traditional Judaeo-Christian culture of their minority or have it replaced by the Islamic culture of the majority.
In theory, the cultural and legal assimilation of Europe's Muslims would be the ideal. This was supposed to be the notion behind the vision of the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, of a "French church of Islam" with homegrown imams.
But knowledgeable observers say his "moderate" Council of Muslims has made radical Islam the government-sanctioned norm for all Muslims.
For Islamists, assimilation is contamination since, in Professor Bernard Lewis's words, "Muslims must not sojourn in the land of the infidel". Intermarriage should be another route to assimilation, though in France this usually involves an Islamic male and often the wife converts to Islam.
Meanwhile, the state of Christendom in France is perilous. Catholics may not have reached the secular nirvana of the Church of England's working party that declared the Sunday Sabbath redundant, but French Catholicism, except for little pools of the faithful, is taken with the notion that their Church will be borne forward only if the next Pope is ready to "dialogue" with Islam - a code word that augurs dilution of the faith.
Currently, Islamists are only a fraction of France's Muslim population. In last week's demonstrations against the headscarf law, only 20,000 people turned out. But as in all radical movements, the young are the driving force. As their numbers increase, the militancy of Islam is likely to increase as well.
Europe's chickens are coming home to roost. The Great Powers used the Commonwealth or La Francophonie to continue the fiction of Empire. Large numbers of people were admitted mainly from North Africa.
The borders of mainland France seemed extended to include Algeria. Guest workers arrived to satisfy needs for cheap labour. Unloved by their host country, they were marginalised in shabby living conditions, with no attempt made to assimilate them. Political refugees and asylum seekers moved in.
Early arrivals, such as the White Russians or the Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters, never intended to assimilate. They were sitting out bad weather before returning home. More recent ones, who arrived because of Nato policies in the Balkans, have been greeted with hostility and distrust.
European countries are not organically immigrant societies. The groups that went to America in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries did so specifically to become Americans. They wanted to shed their past and, within a generation, they did. America's emphasis today on faith and God is just an echo of the founding Pilgrims for whom Christianity was central.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/01/26/do2601.xml
I don't know if the Telegraph is left or right, but I'm sure the usual suspect will say it is manufacturing the data.
| Quote: |
More are on the way. Today, the Muslim birth rate in Europe is three times higher than the non-Muslim one. If current trends continue, the Muslim population of Europe will nearly double by 2015, while the non-Muslim population will shrink by 3.5 percent.
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http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/fellows/taspinar20030301.htm
From Brookings, which I understand to be center-Left.
I see no evidence that France is different from the rest of Europe. Three Times higher, the Islamic birthrate is. |
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sundubuman
Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Location: seoul
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 8:19 am Post subject: |
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I think it's totally logical to connect the dots on this....
France has an increasingly Muslim/Arab population.....and
voila the French birthrate miraculously jumps...
and the socialist mouthpieces give credit for this to.......SOCIALISM!!!!!
well done France. |
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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 6:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Adventurer wrote: |
| BJWD wrote: |
I'll be as diplomatic as possible.
I have seen evidence that muslims are providing the 'baby boost' in France, from Mark Steyn's book America Alone. Now, I know that you all think he fabricated those stats, so, I would like it if perhaps someone could provide evidence that he is wrong. In other words, I would like to see evidence that if the muslim population was removed, France would still have a birthrate above the Southern Europe average of 1.4..
I have done some minor google searching of this, and it would seem that the right-wing types quote stats that you would all disagree with. But I do not see other stats being presented. |
Well, Britain has millions of Indian and Pakistani Muslims. Why are they behind? Do you know what the rate is for Euro-Francophones? The Muslims are 5% of the French population. Are their numbers enough to make them the winner by far? |
Evidence, adventurer, not reasoning. I want evidence that I am wrong. I'm not the stubborn type, if I see evidence that I am wrong, my opinion will change. Help me out, eh? |
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