Why is the Notion of Family So Important for Nation States?

 

     “Family is the building block of society.” I am sure that these words are really familiar for you. So who is the concept of family important for? Each country has an ideal family structure, and accordingly these countries have family policies.

   We are in a period where states closely follow the private issues of families and poke their noses in to these issues, so to speak. Governments began to interfere with families about  from how many children they will have to what method of birth they will use. The important thing is what they do it for.

    Economy has become the most important thing for our lives. Such that, it is important for not only our lives, but also nation states’ policies. As it is said above, nation states interfere with families about their parenthood and sexuality. The reason for this is not for the benefit of societies as it is supposed, but for contributing to the economy of the states.

    In some , states encourage families to have natural births. The reason is that a woman body can have caesarean section only two times. In the third, various complications can become more possible. So, having more children can be dangerous for women in caesarean sections. With this, as it is said before, it is important that why it is interfered by governments even for this issue.  Of course, it is about the economy. Less children means less population and it means less young population. Young population causes less workforce for nation states’ economy. The absence of these affects the economy badly and ages the population. Unfortunately, nation states view the aging of populations from a very different perspective.

  In modern countries, the elderly population is increasing steadily due to the fact that now women are also in the working life, in other words in the production cycle, so they have fewer children and sometimes even no birth at all. Interestingly, even economy is affected by this situations negatively in states.  

    In social states, elder people should be cared by the governments. As the elderly population increases, the elderly population, which the states are responsible for, also increases and the states economies are negatively affected. In addition, the states are not satisfied with the increase in the elderly population, as the number of people receiving pensions will also increase. Governments do not want this either. For instance, government of Turkey’s some policies are really explanatory for this issue.

      Turkish government encourage their society to have at least 3 children. Moreover, propagated by the government and its supporters that women should not work and should stay at home and care for children and the elderly. Although the reason for this is shown as religious reasons, it is purely for economic reasons. The government do not want to pay money to employees to take care the children and the elderly. The government insists on seeing this as an expense as a burden to the state. As a solution, the state is proposing not to charge the state care costs by keeping women at home and taking care of the elderly and children.

   In addition the Turkish Government, a lot of other governments think similarly and they shape their policies on these perceptions. Another example that proves that economy affects women's sexuality and parenthood is from India. As it is known, while surrogacy is prohibited in some countries, it is legal in some countries and India is one of these countries. India gets a good income thanks to its policy on surrogacy. Young women with poor financial situation become surrogate mothers for wealthy families who cannot have children and earn money in this way. India actually made this legal for a very different purpose. The aim of India is for rich and upper class families to be able to breed and poor and lower class people not to reproduce much, and therefore to have more upper class individuals in the population.

   To sum up, we can see that how much nation states care modern nuclear families by looking at examples. Not only India and Turkey, a lot of modern nation states follow similar policies about family and they use the femininity. So indeed, families -or women- are the buildings of society.