97
France sends letters to 29-year-olds telling them to get on with having children
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
97 points (92.9% liked)
World News
53749 readers
2332 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
NO FUCK OFF
Do you not want to be notified about free healthcare options available to you? Because if you ignore the ragebait headline and filter the article for its rage potential, the following quote explains it pretty nicely:
"The letter is being sent to 29-year-olds because women are able to have their eggs frozen at that age without a medical certificate. Women will also be reminded that social security in France covers the cost of freezing eggs for women between 29 and 37. "
So woman are being told how to keep the option for kids open for longer. That is quite the opposite of pressuring them into anything if you ask me.
People can't have kids earlier because living costs are so high relative to salaries, so to afford merelly the 2-bedroom appartment for a 1-child (much less the 2-3 need to maintain population levels) family even a couple of two university-educated full-time workers has to work years.
Even if people stay in schooling for longer now and start working older, even somebody with a degree finishes studying at the age of 20 or 21.
Further and for women specifically, the lack of availability of quality and cheap kindergartens often means that childbirth will totally torpedoe a woman's career because often and due to local cultural expectations the woman is the one who ends up staying home for a couple of years to raise a child and that has been show to majorly delay career progression in a way that is seldom possible to later recover from.
Both of these things can be address with appropriate government policies to make housing and kindergartens cheap, but successive neoliberal governments actually do the opposite (insane house prices are great for realestate investors and you can't have cheap public kindergarten provision competing with private businesses) and instead push forward solutions like this so that couples can have children later, something which should not have been necessary in the first place.
I fully agree. I also think it is a terrible way of improving the number of children. And they should focus on improving conditions for the poorest half of the population a lot more.
But that doesn't mean I think the idea is so abhorent that I would be insulted by receiving the letter. (Ok, I personally would, but that is because I'm not a woman.) I'm fine with them sending the letter. Heck, pointing out free healthcare options is great! By all means: let women know what their options are.
For me such a letter is like somebody who has wipped you across your back your whole life offering you some bandages.
Not only is it profound hypocrisy that the people fucking up young people's lives are passing themselves as good guys, it's also an attempt at offsetting the side effects for those very people of their own nasty behavior towards others with a self-serving "solution" for the behavior changes all that nastiness causes on others, to avoid the real solution which is to stop that nasty behavior.
"You'll keep on fleecing you but here's a way reduce the side effects for us by letting you keep on having kids for us to fleece".
If one looks at it from a grander strategical point of view, this shit is profoundly insulting.