ArcaMax

PARIS — “Bonjour! It’s the French government. Did you know that you can freeze your eggs?” This is literally the message that’s now being mailed out to 29-year-old French citizens by the state, which has apparently become indistinguishable from your pushy mother-in-law who keeps asking when you’re going to give her grandkids.

What the French health ministry calls a “targeted informational diffusion” as part of its new “fertility plan,” is meant to “reinforce young adults’ power to act, without injunction or social pressure.”

So basically, it’s the technocratic, polite, bureaucratic and gender-neutral alternative (at least on paper) to Team Trump’s blunt, nostalgic, moralistic and openly gendered appeal for women to make more babies in the U.S. — with Trump having promoted himself as the “fertilization president.” Only the tone is different, with the French government presenting it not as coercion but mere suggestion. But the power dynamic of the state trampling on women's personal autonomy is the same, whether it’s through President Donald Trump’s grievances or President Emmanuel Macron’s nudging.

Western democracies are now resorting to panicked pushiness, presumably because padlocking the family planning clinics like Josef Stalin did in the Soviet Union in 1936, to boost the number of soldiers and workers for the Motherland, isn’t an option that would go over so well these days. Not that some wouldn't be tempted to try, if they could. Trump came through for his anti-choice donor class by endorsing near-total, state-level bans on family planning after appointing Supreme Court justices who imposed national restrictions on reproduction, which is basically the modern twist on historical pronatalism.

France is barely masking its own crackdown. It’s just packaging it differently. Largely because it has no choice. Access to reproductive freedom was made an enshrined constitutional right in 2024, notably in reaction to Trump enabling the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the fear among European women that the phenomenon might go viral in the event that power fell into the wrong hands.

No “injunction,” says the French health minister, in launching the state's fertility campaign. What are they even talking about, though? What “injunction”? Forcing people to reproduce? For all their attempts at soft-pedaling the issue, French President Emmanuel Macron has nonetheless outright referred to the need for a “demographic rearmament.”

So now it’s a national security issue, apparently. You still have reproductive freedom, ladies, but the government says that people are supplies that need replenishing. Where’s the “war” this time?

Well, there’s a need to shore up the tax base that the government has royally messed up through its own mismanagement. More taxpayers, more government revenues and more cash to pay for the ever-growing and broke French social security system where retirees now out-earn the average working person, according to the Financial Times.

On one hand, productive people are fleeing the country. On the other, the state has also opened the floodgates to migration with almost no regard for the result on productivity or drain on costly government services and benefits.

So now it’s up to women to clean up the state’s mess and compensate for their errors. Get those uteruses to the front lines, ladies! “Liberté, Égalité, Ovulé!”

Seems they’ve run out of ideas for how to create a better future for their citizens, so their political anxiety suddenly comes crashing down on something that at least gives them the illusion of control. Their desperation is already proof-positive that it’s going to be a tough sell. Obviously, young people have different options and ideas of how they’re choosing to spend their lives, and how much they want to depend on others, including their own unpredictable leaders.

It’s telling that the mailout is only being sent to 29-year-olds and not to everyone of reproductive age. Of course, the media attention that this is getting means that everyone else will have received the message anyway. The French government also says that fertility stakes are “shared among men and women,” but yet there’s no equivalent to the egg freezing recommendations for men — like, “The state recommends that guys keep all tech devices out of the vicinity of their family jewels in order to prevent the destruction of sperm.”

The messaging risks propagandizing the general population against those who value personal freedoms — reproductive or otherwise. It is a national security and “rearmament” issue after all. So are you a patriot or are you just another traitor for wanting to deviate from the government-approved script?

A report by a U.S. think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, has employed similar militaristic language, drawing comparisons to nuclear weapons, and calling for a “Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family,” blaming “free love, pornography, careerism, the Pill, abortion, same‑sex relations, and no‑fault divorce.”

Apparently, the anti-freedom donor class to the think-tank is winning against its other donors who prioritize personal liberties. Which is a surefire way to generate a feminist backlash, since feminism, for all its insufferable leftist litmus testing stemming from the day’s labor union-style loyalty pledges, risks being the only ideology left that defends against motherhood or fatherhood as a mandate, and supports one’s right to choose to either be a homemaker or else a careerist, to have a family or get married — or not. What an unfortunate own-goal for the freedom movement on the right.

And all for what? It’s not like these Western societies can even manage to create the kind of public life that accommodates both adults and babies. The French state-owned train company recently tried to introduce a very limited number of high-fare child-free carriages on an even more limited number of trains to accommodate adults focusing on business or who just want some peace and quiet.

The result was a major public debate and controversy over whether anyone should be permitted to pay to escape the reality of children.

How ironic. While implicitly acknowledging the need for limits and personal preference for child-free soundtracks on trains, France is militarizing fertility that effectively implores women to ignore that children change how society sounds and functions. It struggles to accommodate them in public life, yet demands more of them. Not to mention that French teachers are quitting in droves, tired of being given the belt by students and parents, and leaving the government to grapple with a critical shortage.

Cranking out more people so governments can funnel more money into the same black hole isn’t a solution. But congrats, ladies, your womb has been officially reclassified as a frontline asset in the demographic war. One that's being fought against your own agency and autonomy to questionable political and societal value. And no amount of spin can make that less obvious.