'It Is Time to Reflect On Whether Or Not to Have a Child'—Oh, Boy.
In its efforts to combat infertility, France is missing the point. That's because a decision to have a child isn't just a medical issue, it's a social one, too.
This summer, I will receive a letter from the French government. It will arrive nestled among wedding invitations and supermarket fliers, addressed to me personally. It is the same letter that will go out to hundreds of thousands of other 29-year-olds in France, both women and men, and its opening line has already been drafted: “It is time to reflect on whether or not to have a child.”
The letter—a first of its kind for France—is the lead step in President Emmanuel Macron’s 2024 pledge to “combat” infertility and strive for what his government is calling réarmement démographique—“demographic rearmament.” Militaristic language for an intimate choice. It is a plan that focuses obsessively on infertility—as if declining birth rates were a medical issue, rather than a social one.
France’s fertility problem
France’s fertility rate now stands at 1.56 children per woman. In 2025, 645,000 babies were born in the country—2.1% less than in 2024 and 24% less than in 2010. For the first time since World War II, France registered more deaths than births. According to a 2022 government-ordered report, infertility plagues some 3.3 million French men and women—but it is just one among a myriad of factors behind France’s falling birth rates.
A report by the French National Assembly released this month found that though French people still want children, they are being held back by “economic, professional, and symbolic obstacles.” Yet it is infertility—and how best to circumvent it—that will be the focus of the letter that France’s 29-year-olds will receive this summer.
Officially, the government insists the letter is not an injunction. “The role of politics is not to say whether one should have children or at what age,” France’s health minister Stéphanie Rist has said. What the government wants to combat, she argues, is the lack of information that leads to what she calls “if I had known” situations. The message of the letter, Rist promises, will be “balanced,” covering contraception (which Macron’s government made free for those under 26), sexual health, medically assisted reproduction, and the preservation of sperm and eggs.
The flagship measure of the plan is to provide easier (and free) access to egg freezing for 29- to 37-year-olds, which was made legal for non-medical reasons in 2021. To date, the right to freeze one’s eggs in France has so far been largely theoretical: Wait times for most people drag on for one to two years, hospitals are turning away patients due to overwhelming demand, and the system often feels stretched to breaking point. To speed things up, the government will authorize dozens of new centers to perform the procedure, both public and private.
Many of my female friends are struggling with infertility; others are struggling with the decision of whether to have children at all. No doubt, the phrase “deciding to have a child” will be jarring to those who already know they can’t, but I also know increased access to egg-freezing will be welcome for others. Either way, egg freezing is framed as emancipation, a technological fix to buy some time against the biological clock.
Josie Cox
Missing the point
Focusing on infertility misses what feminist researchers call the contraceptive and procreative “mental load”—the fact that it is women who will likely track ovulation, schedule gynecological appointments, inject hormones, and carry the emotional weight of “family planning,” while continuing to work and pay the very taxes that make this “war” on infertility possible.
It likely won’t address the daily arithmetic—think: rent, childcare and food—that makes modern parenthood feel next to impossible. In a 2024 survey, 54% of French people cited economic insecurity as the primary barrier to having children.
As for long-minimized and overlooked conditions like endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)—clear barriers to procreation that activists have been shouting about for years—yes, they are finally being addressed, but the difference is the purpose. Care, in this scenario, is conditional on the ultimate goal, which is childbearing.
Emma Haslett
Who is encouraged to reproduce—and who is not
France’s natalist tradition has always been selective, but today the exclusions are stark. Sperm donation (a key issue for single women and lesbian couples) remains desperately under-promoted, despite years of warnings from civil society groups. Trans men legally lose access to eggs frozen prior to their change in civil status. In Mayotte, a French territory in the Indian Ocean where birth rates are higher, and where nearly half the population is foreign-born, and is overwhelmingly Muslim, women have been systematically offered tubal ligation in public hospitals since 2023.
And lest we forget, the letter itself will only be sent to 29-year-old French citizens, not residents.
So to be clear, France wants more babies, sure, but babies raised within the contours of a heteropatriarchal, French passport-bearing family.
All this, as maternal and infant mortality rates remain higher than in many neighboring countries. Maternity wards are closing, understaffed, or run according to profitability metrics. Suicide is the leading cause of death among mothers in their child’s first year of life.
By reducing the birth crisis to a question of individual fertility planning—as if you weren’t aware that fertility declines with age—the state neatly avoids interrogating the conditions it has created. Precarious work; inaccessible housing; understaffed schools and hospitals; a society that excludes children from certain public spaces—last month, the French public rail network introduced a “no kids” train car, to much public outcry—while demanding that women keep producing those children.
Will I read the letter when it arrives? I will. And I will note its careful wording, its insistence that I am free to choose. I will welcome its efforts to tackle infertility. But I will also note what it refuses to see: that my body is not an incubator for a dying economic model, and that no amount of “demographic rearmament” will work if the world I am being asked to populate looks more uncertain by the day.
Emma Haslett
