Where French Babies Come From

Amour Rules in France but Weddings Don't, according to a story from the Associated Press. (Thanks to reader Patrick Rist for the link.) In France,

Nearly half of children are now born out of wedlock, and the marriage rate is down 27 percent compared to 1970 — prompting calls for reform of France's widely used civil unions.

Yet, declares the article, France is enjoying "a baby boom." Indeed, Paris Match, a sort of French People, recently ran a cover story with the headline, "France, champion of births."

Before you get too excited, the article also admits that the French birth rate is only 1.94, below the replacement rate of 2.1. Admittedly, that's second in the European Union, behind Ireland's 1.99 (the Republic of Ireland, that is, but still, it's not a number to crow about. It doesn't make a country a "champion of births." Rather the opposite.

The article includes this judgment by a French sociologist:

The evolution of French families contradicts certain stereotypes handed down over the years, said Claude Martin, a sociologist with France's National Center for Scientific Research. The first is that countries with many practicing Roman Catholics — such as Italy, Spain or Poland — have higher birth rates than more secular countries such as France. The second is that working prevents women from having children.

"Countries where women have access to professional life are also those where the birth rate is higher," Martin told Le Monde newspaper.

Dr. Martin is not a sociologist I trust, based on these quotes. He offers the implied contrast between countries with "many practicing Roman Catholics" and those "where women have access to professional life," as if they didn't in countries like Spain and Italy and I'm fairly sure even more traditional Poland. This is just sloppy sociology, and a use of sociology whose ideological intent is obvious.

Then, rather more seriously, he makes a judgment about the birth rate in France without, I am almost certain, thinking about where those new French babies are coming from. I have read in several articles recently that the increase in the birth rate in France comes almost entirely from the Muslim population — the partly unassimilated Muslim population, whose mothers do not work — and not from the native French themselves. If so, his statistic is worthless and both his claims about "secular France" false.

You can find the European Union's statistical report in Statistics in Focus's First demographic estimates for 2005. (It is a pdf file.) It gives the birth rates per 1,000 people but not per woman.

Comments

[Ethan Cordray]

I think the knock on Dr. Martin for conflating the issues of Roman Catholicism and female professionalism is a little unfair. Sure, the quote juxtaposes those two issues rather closely, but it doesn't explicitly link them. Im not saying Dr. Martin is inocent of what you accuse him of, merely that the quote in the post doesn't indicate his guilt.

[GL]

I do not know the accuracy of the data or the original sources, but in "A Catholic Alternative to Europe’s Social Model," Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Senior Fellow in Economics with the Acton Institute states the following:

[I]n France, approximately one birth in three is to a Muslim family. Stripped of the Muslim influence, the fertility rate of the native-born or traditionally European French would be 1.2, similar to the rates in Italy and Spain.

[GL]

For a comparison of fertility rates around the world, purportedly based on the CIA World Factbook, see http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=31.

[John P Sheridan]

I agree with Ethan that the article does not contrast Catholicism with women in professions--even implicitly. It appears Martin treats them as independent criteria.

ut I agree that France's large and fertile Muslim population undermines the conclusions that Martin draws