PRIZE WINNERS: President Chirac recently presented 38-year-old mother of nine Claire Denis, above right, with the Médaille de la Famille Française, an award devised in the 1920s to reward fertility

This is taken from the new Time Magazine. Europe has a real hard time getting anyone to have children. I would think they would make it easy for people to adopt, and that they would even pay for the adoption (or at least part of it) but no...

The hard fact is that most European populations are shrinking and getting older, and today's children can look forward to seeing a big chunk of their future earnings taxed to support their elders. Even for countries with liberal immigration policies, maintaining current population levels requires a birthrate of around 2.1 children per woman. Yet in 2004, Spain recorded a birthrate of 1.32, lower even than Germany's 1.37 and Italy's 1.33. Even France, the second-most fertile European country after Ireland thanks to the noble efforts of Claire Denis and her compatriots, failed to hit replacement levels, with a birthrate of 1.9.