Spain labors to bring home baby - and the bacon

In the tiny southwestern town of Calzadilla, new mothers receive more than just a little bundle of joy.

The mayor awards a live Iberian pig - more valuable than a year's supply of diapers in this ham-producing region - to every couple with a newborn. It's his way of encouraging more births in a nation with one of the world's lowest fertility rates.

"I'd rather have free day care than a free pig, but every little bit helps," says Isabel García, a social worker who won the porcine prize - worth about $300 and the prospect of good eating - after her daughter was born in May.

While only 40 piglets have been awarded since 1994, the idea has spawned other incentives, including family discount cards for utilities and tuition, and a "fertility jackpot" in Valencia of about $3,500 to any woman who has a second child.

But many here say these efforts fail to understand the reasons behind reluctant motherhood. Some of the factors are economic. Others stem from a newfound independence among Spanish women who watched their own mothers wilt under familial burdens.

Spanish women's advocates list a host of disincentives to childbearing. As in Italy and Germany, two other European countries with falling birthrates, day care remains scarce. Employment discrimination against Spanish women is still prevalent, as are salary gaps between the sexes.

Twice as many women as men are jobless in Spain, and 40 percent of women lucky enough to find a job have temporary positions. While it's illegal to fire a woman for getting pregnant, employers often look for excuses not to renew her yearly contract, says Susan Brunel of Spain's Labor Commission. Many women put off having kids until they have more reliable employment. The situation is so dire that, this spring, Spain's conservative administration announced a plan that would, in effect, pay businesses not to fire pregnant women.

Would-be moms also cast a wary eye at recent history, when a stay-at-home mother with lots of children was the religious, cultural, and governmental ideal. Just a generation ago, families of eight or 10 kids were common, and the Franco regime also gave cash awards each year to the largest brood. The sale of contraceptives was illegal in deeply Catholic Spain, and a woman couldn't even open a bank account without her husband's consent, let alone end an unwanted pregnancy.

In 1976, a year after Gen. Franco's death, Spain was third in Europe in numbers of births, behind Ireland and Portugal.

With the advent of democracy in 1978, the suppression of women's rights gave way to a society that valued "freedom" above all else, especially sexual freedom.

The Pill can be bought without a prescription. Prostitution and abortion are legal, gay and straight couples have equal rights and, in Andalusia, taxpayers subsidize sex-change operations.

Rejection of motherhood, in this context, fits into a pattern of rebellion against the old, machista order says women's rights advocate Carmen Pujol of the Association of Women Jurists. "Women don't want to live the life their mothers did, so they go the other way."

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