Imagine you are a young French woman. You’re a nurse, a doctor, a cashier, a teacher, a banker, an engineer, an employee of Amazon. Perhaps you’re unemployed. No matter what your situation, if you discover you are pregnant with your first child, you know you are entitled to a 16-week paid maternity leave, 6 weeks before, 10 weeks after, the birth. If you find out you’re carrying twins, the leave jumps to 34 weeks; triplets, 46.
As for the father, he is entitled to a 24-day paid paternity leave of which 4 days are required at the time of birth.
Daily indemnities for a maternity leave are based on total earnings—or unemployment benefits—during the 3 months that precede it and cannot exceed a cap of 3,377 euros a month. These indemnities are paid by the French Sécurité sociale, the national health insurance system to which all French employees and employers contribute.
When the leave comes to an end, by law, the woman returns to the same position she held before her pregnancy.
If a second child arrives, there will be a second maternity leave, longer than the first, taking into account the mother already has a toddler on her hands. If she or her husband wish to spend more time at home with children of 2-and-a-half years or younger, they can request a “PreParE,” a parental leave that enables them to reduce their time at work to either a 4-day week or half-time while receiving a monthly stipend, capped at 406 euros, to replace income lost.
If you are a low-income family, you are entitled to rental assistance and “energy checks” to help pay heating bills. Single parents receive aid for housing and food. Many families receive “back-to-school” benefits to help pay for books, new shoes, clothes and school supplies.
For babies and younger children, working parents have access to a wide network of public and private daycare—though it can be very difficult to find a place. Required public schooling begins when a child is 3 and all children must stay in school till age 16. For low-income families, scholarships for junior high and high school students are available.
Of course, what I am describing here on paper may not always run smoothly in practice and such services depend on enormous bureaucracies that have never been easy to navigate. Since government personnel has been reduced, beneficiaries of such aids are required to do more of the administrative work themselves, and without a computer or a smartphone, some are left behind.
That said, French government policy is solidly pro-children and pro-life, the reflection of a society that takes seriously its collective responsibilities.
Once they’ve finished high school, young people can move on to a basically free university education (there are yearly enrollment fees of a few hundred euros). Low-income students are entitled to scholarships to help pay living costs. Housing in state-owned dormitories is reasonably priced, though scarce.Upon entering the adult world of work, a young Frenchman or woman has been nurtured by a society whose government taxes its citizens heavily and invests heavily in life. It is also a society that believes guns have no place in public space. Semiautomatic weapons are outlawed in France, except for some very rare exceptions. In the streets, no one but the police or the military openly displays a holster and gun.
When it comes to climate control and the sacrifices it entails for all of society, it’s an uphill battle. As I write, France is experiencing a record-breaking heatwave, but government policy, at the municipal and state level, is moving forwards, not backwards, recognizing the climate crisis is real. Slowly, much too slowly, we’re recognizing our lives and the lives of future generations depend on making changes now.Finally, in France, a country where “post-birth babies” and children are well cared for thanks to nationwide solidarity, abortion has been legal since 1975. The law was written by Simone Veil, minister of health under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. At age 16, this woman was deported to Auschwitz because she was Jewish. She lost her father, her mother and her brother in the death camps. In 1952, she lost her beloved elder sister Madeleine who, like Simone, survived Auschwitz, but was killed with her husband and child in a car accident.
No one can accuse Simone Veil of not knowing the value of life.
Another French woman, Françoise Héritier, anthropologist and a near contemporary of Simone Veil, wrote two groundbreaking books called Masculin/Féminin I and II. In them she argues that men’s domination of women is deeply rooted in the earliest observations of humanity. From the first, men observed women could do more than reproduce themselves. They could also reproduce members of the opposite sex. From the start, men knew they could not do that. It thus became imperative to control women’s reproductive functions.
Things have not changed much since then.
In the American press, I read that anti-abortion proponents consider the overturn of Wade Vs Roe by the Supreme Court as a victory for “pre-born babies.” It is surely not a victory for the “post-born.” Even in Pottsville, gun owners with permits can walk through the street and past schools with holster and gun around their waists. This is the result of another recent Supreme Court ruling where the safety of children is sacrificed to the demands of the NRA, and freedom is construed in the narrow terms of every man for himself.I love my country. I love and miss the United States and would consider spending more time there were I eligible for Medicare. Despite having worked several years in the country, I am not. A French person in my situation would remain eligible for such benefits in France.
At the same time, the current situation of the United States deeply worries me: climate controls have been scrapped by government decree; the middle class remains heavily taxed while the wealthy can easily escape their fiscal responsibility; universal health care for children and mothers remains an impossible dream. And it almost goes without saying, guns are everywhere.
As for those who are anti-abortion, I’ll believe they are “pro-life” the day they’re ready to fight with the same zeal for the rights and care of “post-born” babies, making the life and well-being of each and every child a national priority.
