A small French town is to offer expectant mothers 1,000 euros from next year to give birth at the local maternity ward in a bid to save it from closing.
The initiative from January 1 comes as birth rates dwindle nationwide, and countryside hospitals increasingly close their maternity units.
The labour ward in Saint-Amand-Montrond in central France is among around 20 in the country that does not meet the legally required 300 births a year to stay open.
Management projects just 226 births at the ward by the end of the year.
Councillors late Thursday approved the plan to offer future mothers vouchers worth 1,000 euros ($1,160) to spend at local businesses if they agreed to bring their child into the world in the town, instead of travelling to a bigger hospital.
“We’re not paying women to have babies, we’re giving money to women who are already pregnant and decide to give birth in Saint-Armand,” right-wing mayor Emmanuel Riotte told AFP.
He said mothers would have to come in for prenatal check-ups first.
“Of course complicated births will have to be redirected to a specialised hospital, as has been done for decades,” said the mayor of the town of around 10,000 residents.
But some doctors are against the idea.
Four doctor unions — representing anaesthesiologists, obstetricians and emergency physicians — have warned patients should not be choosing where to give birth solely based on monetary compensation, warning of the risk in case of complications.
“When a maternity ward is threatened with closure, it’s not for economic reasons but for safety reasons,” they said this week in a joint statement.
Anne Wernet, of the national anaesthesiologist union, told AFP rural maternities, which often had trouble attracting qualified staff, should be closing in the interest of mothers and newborns.
In small countryside clinics, “nothing happens for a long time and when there’s a problem, there’s no one there to deal with it properly”, she said.
But local politicians view hospitals as key job providers.
In Saint-Amand-Montrond, the maternity ward employs 34 people out of 675 working for the hospital and nursing home.
The number of maternity wards has dropped by around a fifth in the past decade, to 457 in 2023.
The lower house of parliament earlier this year backed a bill to stop the closure of rural obstetrics clinics, but the senate is still to examine it.
Fertility rates are in decline across the European Union, including in France.
But women in France on average gave birth to 1.6 children in 2023, the second-highest fertility rate in the bloc after Bulgaria, according to EU statistics.
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