Sex Please! Danes Vow To Save Town Schools By Having More Kids

Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch

As schools and daycare centers in a Danish town face closure, parents have agreed with local councils to have more sex and thus make more children to improve birth rates, local media report.

The parents in the town of Thy, northwestern Jutland, promised to procreate after being warned that childcare and educational institutions might be closed or merged with others in adjacent areas due to dwindling pupil numbers.

They brokered an agreement with Thisted Council under which locals will try to have more kids over a four-year period

Politicians urged area estate agents, banks and civic institutions to help save the institutions and keep residents from moving away.

 “When it comes to partnership deals, it’s all about cooperating with many local actors to build up a synergy. It’s cooperation, and not just with the parents. We need to get the falling birth rates turned around,” Thisted Council spokeswoman Ulla Vestergaard told broadcaster DR on Thursday.

The deal comes amid dropping birth rates and growing numbers of women planning to have kids when they are older. According to the Local.dk, the average age of becoming a parent for the first time is about 30 years – five years older than it was in 1970. Twenty percent of Danes never become fathers while twelve percent of women don’t have children or don’t have the number of children they wanted to have, according to the fertility awareness organization, Dansk Fertilitetsselskab. In 2012, the national birth rate was reported at 1.7 children per couple.

Denmark has previously launched several campaigns aimed at encouraging young families to have children.

In October, the Danish Family Planning Association (Sex & Samfund) said it will develop a special educational program to teach students that women’s fertility begins to decline in their late 20s, the Local.dk reported.

“When you look at sex education for the oldest students, it’s largely about how not to have children, so there is a focus on prevention, the use of contraceptives and the option of abortion. That means that young people lack knowledge on fertility and pregnancy,” Sex & Samfund spokesman Bjarne Christensen told the Danish national daily newspaper Berlingske. 

Do it for Denmark! Low birthrate kicks campaign urging Danes to have more sex

In March, a local travel agency launched a perky ad with a patriotic name “Do it for Denmark!” urging Danes to have more sex while on vacation. The Danish travel company called for Danes to have more sex while they’re on holiday – to save the country. They even launched a competition to encourage the people to take a break and conceive kids, as the birthrate is now at its lowest in decades.

Still from YouTube video/Spies Rejser

Spies Rejser Travel has promised three years of free baby supplies and a child friendly holiday for a couple who can prove that they conceived while on a Spies’ holiday. The travel company said it is trying to help tackle the country’s low birth rate by encouraging couples to do it for Denmark.

The birth rate in Denmark is currently the lowest it’s been in 27 years. Almost 58,000 children were born in 2012, but the present rate of 1.7 children per family is not enough to maintain the population.

Eva Lundgren, a spokeswoman for Spies, said that sexologists believe one of the reasons for the low birth rate is that Danes are too busy to have sex.

“Sex specialists believe that Danes are too busy with their daily life and they need to get away, so we hope we encourage people to take a break and have some romance,” she told RT.

The thinking behind the initiative is that a couple’s desire for each other increases while they are taking a break together.

Couples who enter the competition are sent a pregnancy test after the holiday and if it comes up positive, they must send in a picture of the test result to Spies as proof.

Entrants are given a list of romantic cities and the website then asks women to enter the date of their last period so they can take a trip when they are at their most fertile.

There are even useful tips for increasing fertility such as “take advantage of gravity. Lie down for at least 15 minutes after sex.” Men are also advised not to wear tight pants “even if you think it looks good.”

A report published in February described the birth rate among Danish women as “dangerously low” and found that one in five couples in Denmark are childless.

“Many wait too long to have children, creating a greater need for fertility treatments. There is a need to raise awareness, as the problem is approaching epidemic levels,” Soren Ziebe, a clinical supervisor at Rigshospitalet, wrote in the report.

The study noted that in the 1970s the average Danish woman was 24 years-old when she gave birth to her first child. Today the age is 29, but a greater number of women are waiting until they are over 35. As a result more and more couples are relying on fertility treatments to conceive.

But do it for Denmark isn’t just about increasing the birthrate and is also a bit of fun.

“What if you already did your duty? Or what if your chance of conceiving a child isn’t so high,” asks the advert, filming an old couple followed by two gay men.