Last Sunday, in a newly restored building overlooking the Danube, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban delivered the State of the Nation address to a carefully curated crowd. It was his 21st, and arguably most nativist, State of the Nation speech.

The most worrying parts of the speech were not the fearmongering bits about immigration and national security – we have come to expect such prejudice from a man who proudly claims to hold illiberal values. Instead, what caught the attention of many observers was his announcement that women would be now be heavily incentivized to stay home and have children. Lots and lots of children.

A prescient tale

In The Handmaid’s Tale, a 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood, imagines the institutionalization of fertile women as “handmaids” whose only purpose is to serve as a baby-making machine. It’s not a far cry from what Viktor Orban’s government has in store for Hungarian women.

Hungary has a negative growth rate – the country’s population is shrinking, as deaths outpace births. Nearly all other countries on earth help make up for this, at least in part, through immigration. But Viktor Orban sees immigration as defeat, and he is literally closing the country’s borders to foreigners. Orban wants white, Hungarian babies, and he feels no shame in saying so.

“We are living in times when fewer and fewer children are being born throughout Europe. People in the West are responding to this with immigration,” Orban said in his State of the Nation address. “Hungarians see this in a different light. We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children.”

Other lines helped clarify what he meant by “Hungarian children” on the off chance you thought the term was straightforward. He said that he doesn’t want the color of Hungarians to be “mixed with those of others” and that for those “who wanted to live out of their children but not for their children, we are neither understanding nor indulgent.” Translation: women from the largely impoverished, heavily marginalized Roma minority group need not bother trying to join Orban’s baby bonanza.

So, how does Orban plan to get his babies? The scheme, open only to women between the ages of 18 and 40, has several main points:

• A subsidy of some €7,000 toward the purchase of a seven-seat vehicle for families with three or more children.
• A low-interest loan of roughly €30,000 for women under age 40 who are marrying for the first time. If they have two kids, a third of the debt obligation is forgiven; if they have three kids, the entire loan is written off.
• Women who have four or more children will never have to pay income tax again.

It is not terribly surprising that the government has thus far refused to release a cost estimate for the program, but demography experts say it will almost certainly fail in growing the native Hungarian population.

Support (certain) families

There is nothing inherently wrong with programs to encourage and support parents having children and raising families. In fact, they serve as important buttresses for families in need of such support to make ends meet, and they can help sustain and grow a country’s population. It is quite normal for countries to offer married couples with children more favorable tax rates than others; daycare is becoming more accessible and maternity and paternity leaves are being lengthened; and state subsidies for child-related costs are common. Russia even has a national ‘Procreation Day’ when couples are supposed to skip work and make babies.

But these policies are not implemented in lieu of immigration – in fact, there’s not a single European country that has a fertility rate high enough to sustain its population without immigration. And, when implemented by other Western democracies, these policies are not justified by overtly racist desires to create a “pure” population. They also do not seek to subordinate women to the role of birth machine and housewife, although these are the ‘traditional family roles’ that the Hungarian and Polish governments have in mind for women.

Indeed, Poland is the EU’s other grand offender of women’s rights. The country is already home to one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the Union, but the government wishes to make it even stricter. At present, abortions are allowed only if the life of the foetus or health of the mother is at risk, or the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. In 2016, the ruling PiS government tried to ban all abortions, but backed down after massive and sustained protests in cities across the country. Last year the government tried again, this time with a bill that would still allow abortion if the mother was raped or at risk of death, but make illegal any procedure because of foetal disorders. This too was meet with huge protests, but the ultimate outcome remains uncertain.

The Polish government is also curbing women's rights by bribing women to have more children. The government’s Family 500+ measure, introduced in 2016, gives families 500 złotys (€115) a month for the second and each subsequent child. This encourages low-income families to have as many children as possible, essentially making it impossible for the woman to be anything other than a homemaker. Indeed, a report from 2018 studied the first year of the scheme and found that by mid-2017, the labor force participation rate of mothers fell by between 2 and 3 percentage points as a result of Family 500+.

That program complements more overt attacks on women’s rights. A recent, wide-ranging report by Human Rights Watch gives greater depth to the threats against women in Poland. The report finds that the government and other members of the ruling PiS party have “championed retrogressive laws and policies, sought to reinforce traditional gender roles, disparaged feminism, and publicly discouraged efforts to combat violence against women.”

Liberties has previously reported on direct attacks against women's rights activists. In 2017, two women’s rights groups that participated in mass protests against the country’s restrictive abortion had their offices raided by police. Computers and documents crucial to their work were seized. The Women’s Rights Centre, one of the two groups targeted by the raids, considered the event a “pretext or warning signal to not engage in activities not in line with the ruling party.”

Playing politics

The Polish and Hungarian governments have shared aims in their attacks on women’s rights. Both governments have shrewdly used the politics of fear to shore up and keep motivated their bases. Against this backdrop, attacks against women’s rights help to rally base voters to protect ‘traditional values’ from being eroded by foreigners introducing different ideas about family and society.

It is especially important to shore up this support now with the European Parliament elections only months away. Orban admitted last month that his goal for this election is to gain an anti-immigration majority in the EP, so getting his supporters to vote for like-minded EU level representatives is crucial. And the more support his policies get on national level, both in Hungary and in other EU countries, the more difficult it becomes to dismiss them at EU level.

Seeking to control women’s bodies is a popular plank of anti-values platforms, and so, for the most cynical of purposes, women are being turned into political pawns. Their rights are being restricted in support of the lie that doing so makes them – and that family they’re being bribed to raise – safer.