Why Can’t We Be More Like Sweden?
September 27, 2011
WRITING AT SLATE yesterday, Sharon Lerner says the abysmally low birthrate among corporate women is proof of the U.S. government’s stinginess. If only we had universal paid parent leave. You see, dear reader, this is the kind of nonsense that rains down upon us like soot. Lerner might bear in mind that Sweden, which has the most generous parent leave policies in the world, has the very low, below replacement level birthrate of 1.67 children per woman. More parent leave does not equal more children. A child is not an 18-month affair. The more flexibility and parent leave offered, the less desirable children become.
Heaven forbid, Lerner would suggest the obvious: that women return to the greatest job on earth. A socialist would rather see everything in ruins than admit government mandates are not the solution.
Here is another doozy from Lerner, writing about the supposedly high rate of “unplanned pregnancies” (don’t you love that phrase?) among the poor. She states:
Poorer women suffer when they have unintended births—as do their children.
What is the alternative to suffering for being unintended? Non-existence. Seems like a bad bargain.
— Comments —
Art writes:
There is not a single European country today which can claim replacement fertility, so It is high time people stopped viewing it’s social problems as a panacea. There is a systemic problem with modernity, and until it is fixed they will continue to have issues. I would note that the Faroe Islands has a good fertility rate and excellent adoption rate, but no one ever recommends it because it only has 50,000 people is a tiny archipelago. I don’t think they can offer much help to larger countries but at least they have a replacement level birth rate. The Swedes can’t even demonstrate that. All that can be said for Sweden is they have more children than Japan or Italy, which today is not a difficult achievement.
Total Fertility Rates from CIA World Factbook
Faroe Islands: 2.42
Sweden: 1.67
Italy: 1.39
