Drowning the Babies in the Bathwater (Part II)

Last week I pulled a rather cheap stunt, dragging you into a two-part look at Hungary's vastly important but sleep-inducing demographic crisis with a sensational look at csecsemőgyilkosság (baby-murder) and child abandonment in Hungary. To tell you the truth, I almost felt bad about using dead and ditched babies as a literary device. But I don't, because that's how potentially dire the demographic disaster facing Hungary is.

If you haven't seen the numbers, they are nothing short of staggering. If present trends continue, in 50 years' time the population of Hungary will drop by at least 35%, while the number of non-Roma (Gypsy) Hungarians drops even further. Current figures suggest that this year may produce the smallest crop of new Hungarians since the darkest days of WWII, when the country was starving and fighting for its existence.

But forget about 2050. To see the magnitude of the problem, all you have to do is walk down the street, open your eyes and note of the age of the people you see. In most of the world, the young greatly outnumber the old. Here in Hungary, the old are everywhere. But what is so striking about the wrinkled face of Hungary is how relatively brief old-age is in the country. The average Hungarian man still makes it just to 68. The old men are dying off so fast that there is now a female "surplus" of a half-million in the country, the highest man deficit in the EU outside the three former Soviet republics.

István and I are talking about starting a family soon, but I don't want to rush things

But the armies of aged are only the symptom of the problem. The actual disease is the growing unwillingness of the young to be fruitful and multiply. A statistic cited in a recent story in broadsheet Magyar Hírlap neatly illustrates the problem. Among 30-year-old women in Hungary, 33% have never been married, and only 30% have had a child. And because the country's "death spiral" has already begun, it will take more than just the famous replacement formula of 2.1 children to keep Hungary at or near its current population of 10 million. According to a committee on demographics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, every women of childbearing age would need to give birth to at least three children for the decline to stop in the next 10-15 years.

Naturally, any problem of this magnitude will motivate experts and politicians to come up with potential solutions, and Hungary's have. As you may recall, the former Fidesz-led government used the slogan "three rooms, three children, and four wheels" to underscore its commitment to promoting parenthood. And in many ways it did try hard to make good on that pledge, going so far as to offer discount home mortgages to couples on the condition that they produce or promise in writing to attempt to litter the country with at least three new Magyars each.

While scaling back some of these measure, the current, Socialist-led government has continued to at least talk like it considers the demographic slide the country's greatest long-term challenge. Following its predecessor's lead, it promulgated a "National Demographic Program" last December.

In translating the main points of the plan, my researcher/translator sarcastically (and I reckon accurately) summed it up as a "glimpse of a future paradise on Earth." Its main aim is to create an economy that services citizens' welfare and allows for a secure social environment for every Hungarian, and it gets there via enhanced employment opportunities; more investment in education; a war against discrimination and poverty; a transparent and open state; and compliance with all of the European Union's social objectives. In the specific area of raising the birth rate, the 30-page strategy paper stresses the need to increase employment opportunities for women, to increase "social participation" in childcare, and to create a more "child-friendly" social environment. It then ends with some additional ideas about health awareness, environmental awareness, programs for the elderly, issues involving migration, support for ethnic Hungarians abroad, and, as my associate put it: "bla, bla, bla, bla, bla."

While some or maybe even most of these objectives may on their own be quite useful, together they remind me of a Hungarian saying I recently learned when I asked someone how Hungarians say "too many cooks spoil the broth." It goes like this: Sok bába közt elvész a gyerek, and it means that too many nannies and the child gets lost. By aiming so high and spreading its resources so far and wide, the Hungarian state seems unlikely to address specific problems that, if address with focus, energy and discipline, could make a dramatic impact on the nation's demographic destiny.

First and foremost is the utter crisis in the area of women's reproductive health. While there are no doubt many fine ob-gyn practitioners in Hungary, there are not enough. I have heard countless firsthand stories of pregnant women being told they are not pregnant, and of misdiagnoses and mistreatment that make this look like a minor inconvenience by comparison. While this is itself a scandal and a heartbreak, it is also hugely important vis-à-vis demography. As hundreds of thousands of cases of Chlamydia go untreated in the country, potentially rendering each sufferer permanently infertile, some Hungarian gynecologists still tell their patients that the best way to stay in the family way is to avoid sitting on cold rocks. The mind boggles.

Then there is the issue of actually having babies, which is supposed to be free and convenient in Hungary, but is more often a nightmare of bribe-paying and bureaucracy. If you want people to have children, don't allow doctors to demand Ft 100,000 (€407) in hálapénz ("appreciation money") to deliver them. Outlaw it, and enforce the law.

A related problem involves the country's abnormally high abortion rate, which is similarly responsible for a large yet unquantifiable number of female infertility cases. In a nutshell, Hungary needs to follow Bill Clinton's line, and make sure abortion is "safe, legal and rare." This is easier said than done, but not impossible, as some countries have proved.

I want parents, not government

Unfortunately, all this may be for naught, for the country's leaders and voters seem convinced that the best way to promote the production of healthy new Hungarians is to further increase the state's involvement in this most intimate of family decisions. This is, of course, entirely understandable. If you want people to have kids, it seems to make perfect sense that you should give them time off from work, lots of subsidies, and otherwise work to create a paradise on Earth for young couples and their brood.

An understandable point of view, but still wrong. As it turns out, the countries in the world that have supposedly adopted the strongest "pro-family" policies (such as Sweden) have significantly lower birth rates than those more likely to leave people on their own, proving, on a national level, that sok bába közt elvész a gyerek. Because when the state takes over the role of the parents, the parents become babies. And whatever their other charms, babies don't have babies.

Click here to read Part I of this article.