Regional health minister says those who are busy with careers can ‘create offspring’ on work breaks
While addressing a crowd at the Eurasian Women’s Forum in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed government policy geared toward helping women achieve the ultimate balance — professional success while being the linchpin “of a large, large family.”
He went on to joke that Russian women can manage it easily, and still remain “beautiful, gentle and charming.”
His comments are the latest in a public push by government officials to try and reverse Russia’s sinking birth rate by appealing to a sense of patriotic duty and promising financial incentives to sway prospective parents.
Russia’s fertility rate — which measures the average number of children born to a woman over a lifetime — stands at approximately 1.4, less than what is considered the rate for population replacement, which is 2.1. Kremlin officials have labelled Russia’s statistic “catastrophic,” and it comes at a time of higher mortality among younger Russian men due to the war in Ukraine.
You know who else told women it was their patriotic duty to make babies?
These fucks.
What? Authoritarians need their cattle for their system to work? Who’d have thunk?
Let’s be honest now, every country wants people to be fucking to produce more workers to exploit. It’s the entire point of our fixation on growth: more people = more consumption = good. We see countries like Germany, South Korea and Japan scrambling to get people to jizzing into each other but don’t want to give anything up: no diminished work hours at the same or higher pay, no extended parental leave, no free childcare facilities, remote work is looked down upon, working less is looked down upon, etc.
Countries just want more drones that they can throw at the next “patriotic duty” and Russia’s current “duty” is to participate in an invasion with no regard for life. All to fulfill the feverish dreams of an increasingly hostile man wishing to restore non-existent former glory.
I have no argument in general for you, you made good points. But it’s also so, so at odds with all the messaging around teen pregnancy that I remember so clearly growing up. Wait until you can afford it, wait until you have a career, a home, wait until you’re married… From basically 8+, my view of pregnancy was that it fucked up someone’s life.
But now, governments want their people to go against all that programming for absolutely no reward and more emotional manipulation (worrying about everything that these tiny humans need, worrying about staying alive and productive enough as one of only two people responsible for the tiny humans, etc). Wtf, why?
Yeah, it’s hypocritical. Tradition and religion are good tools to control people, but they sometimes conflict with the goal of exploiting those lower on the totem pole. A sufficiently indoctrinated populace won’t resist (much) though. Especially when we are distracted by things like “ermagerd, look at those less fortunate than you!” or “look, she was born a woman but wants a dick, isn’t that TERRIBLE???” or “celebrity did that yesterday, isn’t it despicable???”.