Minister Dmitrovic: I never said anywhere women are to blame for bad demographic picture in Serbia

Photo: Tanjug/Zoran Zestic

"I never said anywhere that women are to blame for the bad demographic picture in Serbia. Quite the opposite. I said that a woman is the center of this story, our absolute priority, that she decides because she gives birth, so it is up to all of us to help her as much as possible, to ask her what else we can do so she decides to give birth to more children."

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This is what Minister of Family Welfare and Demography Ratko Dmitrovic said after appearing on the morning program of TV Prva, where he spoke about the birth rate, the position of women in society and the role of women in increasing the birth rate.

"I also said something that no one has so far said in public, in that way and so openly; that we urgently need to protect women from employers, and there are a huge number of them who see a pregnant woman and a new mother as a problem, a person who stands in the way of them making money and profiting. All this can be checked in 20 minutes, which is how long my guest appearance on one television lasted, where I spoke about demographics. Why the lie? There is no use of that. Only some personal pleasure," stated Minister Dmitrovic.

During his Prva TV appearance, the minister said that a child is no longer the center of the world to people but instead - hedonism is.

"What we have here is nothing new. We all have this problem. This is a consequence of the path of the civilization and of the approach to life. From the position in which the child was the center of the world, we arrived, thanks to that civilizational path, at children no longer being even close to the top. Hedonism has prevailed," said Dmitrovic.

"It is no longer young people's dream to have four children, but, 'I will have two houses, a yacht, I will travel around the world'," the minister for family welfare added.

Dmitrovic said that the role of women in the fight against negative birth rates is very important. When the presenter said that this is not only up to women, Dmitrovic replied, "It is not up them in those 10 percent of cases, and in 90 percent it is." He continued to say that women have experienced complete emancipation and cited as an example that 72 percent of the Serbian judiciary is made up of women, using, we must note, the unusual wording, "to be."

"Women have experienced complete freedom. To be an academic, the best mathematician, an economist, to realize herself in every walk of life. What should we give to that woman, we men, we as society, the state, so that she would make the decision to give birth to a third child," he stressed.

After this, Deputy Prime Minister of the Government of Serbia and President of the Coordination Body for Gender Equality Zorana Mihajlovic reacted and said that it was inappropriate to blame women for the birth rate issue.

Mihajlovic: We all have to participate in increasing the birth rate

"A society in which women are educated and emancipated is not the cause of low birth rates," Mihajlovic stressed. In a statement, she said that the Government of Serbia is committed to promoting gender equality and improved position of women.

"Our task and goal is for women to have the same conditions as men, because that enables them to be mothers, but also to progress in their professional and social life," Mihajlovic noted. She pointed out that equal conditions mean that fathers can use parental leave to look after their children, as well as that gender equality also means sharing household work, having the same salaries for the same work, the possibility of career advancement.

Increasing the birth rate is a process in which we must all participate, Mihajlovic stressed and recalled that the Coordination Body was formed by then Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic with the intention of creating conditions for women and men to have equal opportunities to develop, work and live.

In a statement sent to Dmitrovic, an association called,"Moms Rule" stressed that most women give birth to a child or children because they want to and when they think that there are the right conditions for that, in agreement with the partner.

"Many women are affected by the provisions of the bad Law on Financial Support to Families with Children, and it does not encourage them to decide on a new step in life. Emancipation and insistence on equality have nothing to do with that, as you discreetly suggest in your statements," the association said.

They added that a child is not only the concern of the mother, but also of the father, and that is why emancipation of women inevitably leads to the emancipation of men who increasingly want to and take on obligations that were strictly reserved for women in the patriarchal framework.

"The law and the clumsy statements made by officials of the Government of the Republic of Serbia cause enormous damage and shake the trust in the system and the state in the most sensitive period of life and create additional uncertainty when it comes to expanding they family," said the association.

(Telegraf.rs)