Green MP Sandrine Rousseau strongly criticized Emmanuel Macron’s desire to boost the birth rate in France on Thursday, recalling that “women’s wombs are not a state affair”.
“Every woman is free to choose to have children or not to have them”
“The question of birth rate, we have the impression that it is a kind of state affair (…), women’s uteruses are not a state affair,” declared the Paris MP on TF1. “Every woman is free to choose to have children or not to have them” and “any decision is legitimate”, she insisted, “women do absolutely what they want with their bodies”.
“There is no kind of national issue that there are children”
During his press conference on Tuesday, the Head of State announced two emblematic measures intended to boost the birth rate, while the number of births in 2023 is at its lowest since 1946, according to INSEE: a “birth leave ” of six months, better paid and above all shorter than the current parental leave which can last up to three years and keeps many women away from the job market, as well as a “major plan to combat infertility”.
“There is no kind of national issue in the fact that there are children,” denounced Sandrine Rousseau, evoking a “type of speech” that “we saw in the worst periods of our nation where we took the womb of women as something of the order of public policy where we had to rebuild the population, create children.
“It is not because Emmanuel Macron is going to shout that he wants to rearm demographics and say that we must have children, that the French are going to start having them if they do not have maternity wards, that “They don’t have crèches, if they don’t have enough money, if they don’t have housing, if they don’t have confidence in the future”, also criticized Thursday the head of Ecologists Marine Tondelier. Recognizing on Sud Radio that the president “is right to speak” of infertility, she regretted that “at no time does he ask the fundamental questions of infertility: of our environment which is polluted and the fact that we is poisoned with every glass of water we drink, with every breath of oxygen we breathe, in what we eat.” “We live in an environment which makes us infertile,” she recalled, accusing the head of state of “evading”.