French Baby Boom

"It's almost a ''bebe'' boom: France had more babies in 2006 than in any year in the last quarter-century, capping a decade of rising fertility that has bucked Europe's graying trend, the state statistics agency said Tuesday.

The government trumpeted the figures as a victory for family-friendly policies such as cheap day care and generous parental leave -- many of which were launched under Socialists like presidential candidate Segolene Royal, who was family minister in the early 1990s, and have continued to grow under today's conservative government.

France had 830,000 new babies last year, the highest annual total since 1981, the Insee statistics agency said. That brought France's population to 63.4 million people as of Jan. 1, up from 62.9 million a year earlier." Associate Press, N. Y. Times, Link to Article (last visited 1-17-07 NVS)