With the drastic decline of the birth rate of Denmark, the country has turned to launching campaigns, and companies have resorted to offering considerable compensations for those that choose to get pregnant.
“Part of the problem is that there are fewer women in the country of childbearing age. Couples are also waiting longer to start families, which often makes conception harder, and recent studies have also pointed to low sperm quality in Danish men,” according to an article in the CPH Post Online.
The article stated that most Danish couples say they ideally want to have two or three children, although the numbers show different.
The number of children per couple averages at 1.7 with more than one in five Danish couples ending up childless.
Incentives in Denmark
Spies Rejser Travel, a Danish travel company, a while back jumped on board to help combat the lack of procreation.
In 2014, the company launched a competition in which it provided a reward to all couples that could prove their pregnancy resulted from their Spies’ holiday getaway. It even put up a video on YouTube where it said:
Book your holiday with our ovulation discount. Get it on. And prove you conceived a child to win a 3-year supply of baby stuff.
Rewards consisted of three years of free baby supplies and a child-friendly vacation sponsored by the travel agency if proof of a couples’ pregnancy test showed positive results.
The campaign through the Spies Rejser Travel company was ultimately named ‘Do it for Denmark,’ putting a comical, but very literal, label on the movement.
These incentives were established to help motivate Danish couples to procreate.
Along with the incentives proposed by Spies, Thisted, a municipality in Denmark, did what it could to help the issue, too.
“People in the Danish municipality of Thisted, in north-west Jutland, have agreed on a deal with the council to procreate as much as possible over the next few years to help maintain underpopulated public services. In return, the local politicians have promised to keep schools, nurseries and leisure facilities open – on the condition that parents produce enough new children to fill them,” according to an article in The Guardian.
That is dedication.
Although the birth rate of Denmark is still trending downwards, the efforts to increase it remain strong.
