Posted on 05/21/2006 8:26:09 AM PDT by XR7
Moscow SINCE my daughter Maya was born 10 months ago, I've noted that many of my Russian friends are more likely to express amazement than to share my joy. "Do you really like fussing around with kids?" asked one of them, a television journalist, with sincere incredulity.
It might be that this notion of children as a burden, as an unnecessary bother, is the psychological reason for the catastrophic decline in Russian birth rates (the average woman has 1.34 children, and for every 16 Russians who died in 2004, only 10.4 babies were born). It's hard enough to get by — let's leave children for the future.
Imagine a large city, population 700,000. Every year, Russia loses every person in that city. While 35,000 people are killed in automobile accidents each year, even more die from drugs, alcohol and the consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle. Death triumphs over birth in a country that the state-owned news media grandly calls an energy superpower. The state, at last, has taken note.
In something of a bantering tone, which has become his style of late, President Vladimir Putin declared that the primary concern of the state is now love and motherhood. He proposed to resolve the love question capitalistically; to use financial incentives to raise the birthrate. Thus a woman who decides to have a second child will get about $10,000. And the president underpinned his concern for motherhood with a military concept, arguing that a dwindling population would leave the country unprotected.
I just returned to Moscow from China — where there is an effective ban on a second child — with a strange thought: the Chinese could export extra children to Russia. Really. Until now, Russia has been exporting its children through foreign adoptions. Orphanages effectively trade in children.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Same way as they come in European countries.
Putin's Lebensborn program will only succeed in making women dependent on the state, making fathers irrelevant and destroying the family.
Me, Putin pick me! I volunteer to increase Russia's birthrate.
Russia, land of drunk impotent men, and amoral sluts ready to grab the next rich American off the plane.
LOL let me guess you had a bad experience with a Russian Mail Order Bride
Tendency is for atheists to be me oriented and immediate gratification oriented. If there is no God there is no biblical imperative to be fruitful and multiply
...or stop killing babies - or the crippled, or the infirm or elderly.
Consider, too, WW2 - Russia lost something like 25% of its reproductive-age men.
Certainly, communism didn't help, either.
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