Cav's Place

The European Parliament supports extending the minimum maternity leave to 20 weeks on full pay and one of the key reasons given in support of this decision is that it would encourage women to have more children and therefore alleviate Europe’s aging population problem. As if the world’s overpopulation problem and Europe’s overconsumption problem would be irrelevant in face of what is essentially just an economic issue generated by the current economic model. But, of course, that actually is what they are thinking, since money always come first for such people, or at least second, after power.
But in fact the problem is not the duration, as that would actually need to be increased much more, but the “full pay” part. Replace that with “no pay” and the effect would be the exact opposite, since people would know that they won’t be able to have any income for a certain amount of time after having a child and therefore they’d need to have a whole lot of money saved in advance. It’d stop being an incentive and become a penalty, which is what any law dealing with those who have children under the current circumstances must be, because we must think of the world before we think of anything dealing strictly with the systems we have decided to base our society on.
Just imagine what message would be sent by a decision to force both parents to stay home with no pay, and not even allowing them to work from home, for the first year after the birth of the child, and then only let one of them get back to work, making the other still stay home and not work for two more years. Then I could go even further and say that one parent should stay at home, though they could also work from home if they so choose, until the child is about ten years old, though that could vary depending on how quickly the child grows up. Of course, they’d get to choose which one stays home and which one works, because it’s discrimination to only have such laws for mothers, but at least one parent should be made to stay home. This is something that should happen anyway, since parents need to be there for their children, so two serious problems would be tackled by passing such a law and making sure that the parents in question will receive no pay during this time.
I really don’t like to use the current economic system to pressure people into doing the right thing because this economic system is something I wish would be completely destroyed and replaced by something very different very soon, but the overpopulation problem really needs to be solved right away, so anything that can be done right now has to be at least tried. And what I suggest could certainly be done right now. Nobody has the courage to support such a measure, of course, but if someone would have the courage then it could be done, because it doesn’t require any other changes.

But there’s no hope of any of that coming from the current European leaders, no matter what kind of leaders we’re talking about. One only needs to remember that Robert Edwards was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of human in vitro fertilization. They said he deserved the prize because his work has helped “treat” a “medical condition” that affects 10% of couples. It certainly never crossed their minds that the “medical condition” in question is in fact a blessing for the world under the current circumstances and should preferably somehow spread to about 90% of people instead of being “treated” even in the 10% in does affect…
Interestingly, Edwards’ work did make it possible for researchers to eventually create human embryonic stem cells, which are extremely useful in treating a large number of serious illnesses, or at least they could be if this field of research would be properly encouraged and funded. But the prize was specifically awarded only for the basic technology behind IVF, the Nobel Committee making it clear that it makes no statement about human embryonic stem cells. Because, of course, praising a technology that could cure so many people that are currently suffering terribly could be seen as a bad thing, but praising one that adds even more people to an already overpopulated world is a good thing…

That’s how the European mind seems to work. Of course, that’s how the human mind seems to work in most cases, regardless of the location. It tends to turn itself off when it comes to the issues that the gonads have something to say about, and the results of that are seen everywhere around us, in more ways than one. But European leaders do have one little argument that they always throw at the very few who dare to challenge them on this issue: The fertility rate is already very low in Europe, they say. And indeed it is below replacement level in nearly all countries, but still two or three times higher than it should be if we are to reduce the population to sustainable levels, especially considering how much the average European citizen consumes and pollutes, compared to the average Asian or African citizen. So this “low” is far from low enough, governments needing to encourage this trend more and more instead of struggling to come up with ways to reverse it.
Yet it’s still only other governments that take suitable action. You won’t see anything like that in the “democratic” Europe because, of course, here it is a person’s right to breed as much as they want, no matter how much that harms everyone else and the world as a whole in the long run. It doesn’t matter that in this same “democratic” Europe people may not have the right to marry the person they love, for example, or that they may find themselves unable to afford medical care, healthy food or even a roof over their heads. Oh no, those things can be set aside for later, but try to say something about a person’s right to spew forth even more people and everybody wants to have your neck!