A racy ad campaign, started only nine months ago, has really hit the spot for Denmark's campaign for more baby-making. The country now expects booming birth rates this summer.
According to research by Denmark’s Politiken newspaper, the summer months of June-August this year will produce 1,200 more Danes than last summer. In total, some 16,200 babies are due to be born.
“I’ve never experienced a boom like this in my time as a midwife,” said Ann Fogsgaard, who’s been on the job 33 years.
“Normally, there are more births during the summer compared to the winter, but an increase like this is crazy.”
It all started with cute appeals by Spies Travel to “give the world more babies” and “Do it for mom!” – which gave quite good data on how people tend to get groovier during a seaside vacation, as opposed to an alpine hike. The sad Danish grandmother who anxiously unhooks her own daughter’s bra as she’s about to get down with her boyfriend is made happy. Even the stereotypical, creepy introverted online gamer guy gets some at the end.
After the guilt-card ad, the capital emerged with its own campaign. The City of Copenhagen took a mildly more serious approach, saying you won’t be fertile forever. And the broadcaster DR hopped aboard the baby-making wagon with the aptly-named “Screw for Denmark” (Knald for Danmark) campaign.
“You probably can’t ascribe the increase in births to our campaign, but it’s definitely a feather in our cap if the campaign has had a positive effect,” Copenhagen’s deputy mayor for health, Ninna Thomsen, told TV2 News, adding that she was actually surprised to begin with that so many campaigns for procreation emerged at once.
Denmark is one of those societies where people like to have fun and really enjoy life – the problem is they like to have kids late in life, too, according to the campaigns.
But the efforts are paying off. Danes will have an average 14 percent more in offspring this summer than last, according to Cphpost, and according to Danmarks Statistic – the official national statistics bureau – 1,000 more babies were born in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2015.
The annual birth rate could top 60,000 for the first time in six years, if the Danes continue feeling frisky. The latest bad year for Denmark was 2013, with 4,000 less births than that, which is the lowest figure since 1987.
Things were a flop since 2010, when the average age for a first-time parent was 29.1, a full five years more than the 1970 average.
The ad campaigns join a host of other groovy measures to get things on track, such as introducing changes to the school sex-ed curriculum, as well as somehow coercing parents into pledging to have more sex so that there are enough children to fill schools.
Some success was achieved in Jutland, with pregnancies up by a whole third in 2015, according to a local hospital cited by The Local. It was a shock to residents when public officials said they were considering backing out of the measure. This was in the midst of an increasing number of asylum seekers arriving to the area.