No, women are not getting pregnant to score child grants

Last week I wrote a column responding to the comments from readers following my original opinion piece around the slow pace of UIF maternity payments. Following my comments on the comments, there was another barrage of responses both to News24 and me directly.

Some were just purely misogynistic and I won’t respond to them. However, some were reflective of commonly held beliefs that I have heard repeatedly - especially during the years that I worked for UNICEF.

Although I don’t tend to do this, I decided to go one more round on this topic and write a comment on the comments of the comment on the comments of my comment. (I couldn’t resist that!)

Let me start with the commonly held belief that South Africa has a very high fertility rate.

This is in fact not true. According to the United Nations, the average family size in South Africa is 2.33, which means that on average women in South Africa have only 2 babies. In 1950, the average was just over 6 babies per woman. So, we have seen a sharp decline in the number of births women in South Africa are having, a trend which seems to be continuing year after year.

Many comments linked to fertility rates – especially in the developing world to wider environmental concerns.

Rothphilip for example said: “The point is that there are way too many people on the planet and that drastic steps are needed to reduce the birthrate, especially in developing countries like South Africa…”

I do agree that our planet is under strain from human population and growth, but it is important to note that the vast majority of environmental damage is done by the “developed” world and not the developing world.

 According to UNCTAD, the 46 least developed countries (LDCs) with 14% of the world population contribute only 1.1% of greenhouse gas emissions globally and the carbon footprint of an average person in a “developed” country is more than 23 times larger than that of an average person in an LDC.

Which brings me to a big elephant in the room. It is very clear to me that when people talk about birth control and fertility rates, there is not only a gender issue at stake, but far too often there is also a race component.

I have rarely heard anyone saying that there are too many white babies in the world.

What people almost always refer to - albeit thinly veiled behind language of “developing countries”- is that there are too many babies of colour (be they black, coloured, Indian or Asian) in the world and especially in poorer communities.

These are hurtful narratives with historical reminders of sterilisations without consent in many colonised countries- as well as ours - during Apartheid.

It is true that bigger families are often (although not exclusively) found in low and very low income families of all races. In very poor communities, this is partly due to high infant mortality rates. In these communities women often have more babies because they need additional labour (in the case of agricultural or pastoral societies) and financial help once the children are grown. Compounding this is that experience has taught them that many of their children will not make it to adulthood, so they will have more children. This has been true of all societies with high infant mortality rates, until these mortality rates decline.

Thus, the most effective – and often only - way of reducing birth rates is to improve women’s circumstances, especially life expectations through formal education.

Research on every continent has shown that educated women marry later and have fewer and healthier babies.  It has been proven that the number of years a woman has spent in education almost always inversely correlates to the number of babies she will have. For every year spent in education, infant mortality drops by up to 10%.

So, no amount of birth control will be truly effective until women believe that they have better prospects in terms of work opportunities and income, and thus better health care and child survival rates. This is why it is so important for us to deal with issues such as keeping girls in school during their monthly periods and making it a safe environment in all aspects for them to learn.

Lion and a number of other commentators like M55 and Poeticpleb suggested that women might fall pregnant to get the access to the child grant.

This implies that women are not only greedy, but stupid. As Robinbrimer rightly commented, grants don’t even get close to covering the actual costs of a baby.  

To give you an idea: the current child grant is R480 per month.  Let’s assume the mother uses cloth nappies, the initial outlay for 20 (a newborn needs at least 10 per day) will cost you about a R1000, or 2 months of child allowance. A baby-gro is around R100 each and you will need at least five for a new-born, so that is another month’s child allowance gone. Blankets, cream, soap and vests will cost another month or two’s grant… and those are just the absolute basics. Women know that, and the vast majority would never put their bodies through a pregnancy and birth in order to “score” a meagre R480 per month.

Many commentators continued to express outrage at my assertion that employers should contribute the 1/3rd of salary that the state doesn’t cover, since “they already pay UIF”.

Let’s remember that employers contribute only 1% to UIF. South African women earn on average 35% less than men for doing the same work. So employers in general pay significantly less towards women. That must change, but until it does, it makes all this outrage about having to contribute something during maternity leave a bit disingenuous.

Last week, a court found that a Stellenbosch wine farm must pay a woman R800 000 for an unfair dismissal related to her pregnancy. According to reports, the owner claimed the reasons she was fired were that she didn’t respond to work calls whilst in hospital and wasn’t willing to work from home during maternity leave. Like I said: we need a massive attitude adjustment around pregnancy and childbirth in this country.

I rest my case.