France needs babies. During a press conference on 16 January, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, pledged to tackle the scourge of infertility and offered enhanced parental “childbirth leave” as part of his “demographic rearmament” plan to revive the country’s declining birthrate.

While his goals may be commendable, Macron’s rhetoric sounds alarmingly close to that of authoritarian and rightwing populist leaders who have been aggressively pursuing pro-natalist policies in recent years. After all, Vladimir Putin recently urged Russian women to have “eight or more children” as he seeks to reverse the decades of population decline that have only been exacerbated by heavy casualties in Ukraine.

The centrist Macron is no Putin, and largely secular France may seem unlikely ground for anti-abortion sentiment to thrive, but the French government has been playing a dangerous double game on reproductive rights that could have troubling consequences.

French leaders made a pledge to enshrine abortion rights in the constitution after the US overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, recognising that reproductive freedoms are fragile and at the mercy of a change in government. But Macron’s government has, so far, emboldened and legitimised the country’s anti-abortion movement by resorting to fearmongering around declining birthrates (in 2023, France still had the highest fertility rate in the EU), and directly engaging with anti-abortion........

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