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
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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.