1 Baby=1 Car

[Arpa]

Apparently this is not the first time.

How about they do this in Armenia!

1 baby= 1 BMW, 2 babies = Mercedes, 3 babies=Humvee, and 4 babies=a years supply of Vi.... well, Apricots :ap:??

Russian Region to Host Day of Conception posted 1:23 pm Tue September 11, 2007 - ULYANOVSK, Russia from ABC 7 News - http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0907/454527.htmlMake a baby. Win a car. Don't be surprised if the streets are empty and curtains drawn in this central Russian region Wednesday as residents take up an offer by the regional governor to help stem Russia's demographic crisis. Ulyanovsk Gov. Sergei Morozov has decreed Sept. 12 a Day of Conception and is giving couples time off from work to procreate. Couples who give birth nine months later on Russia's national day - June 12 - will receive money, cars, refrigerators and other prizes.

 

It's the third year that the Volga River region, about 550 miles east of Moscow, has held the contest. Since then, the number of competitors - and the number of babies born - has been on the rise.

 

"If there's a good, healthy atmosphere at home within the family, if the husband and wife both love each other and their child, they will be in good spirits and that will extend to the workplace. So there will be a healthy atmosphere throughout the country," he told AP Television News. "The leadership (of the country) is interested in the family."

 

Russia's population has dropped since the 1991 Soviet collapse, fed by declining birth rates, a low life expectancy, a spike in emigration, a frayed health care system and other factors. The country - the world's largest - now has just 141.4 million citizens, making it one of the most sparsely settled nations. And experts estimate the population could fall below 100 million by 2050.

 

Just 311 women signed up to take part in the first competition, in 2005, and qualify for a half-day off from work. The next June, 46 more babies were born in Ulyanovsk's 25 hospitals compared to the previous June, including 28 born on June 12, officials said.

 

More than 500 women signed up for the contest in 2006 - resulting nine months later in 78 babies, or more than triple the region's daily average. So far this year, the region's birth rate is up 4.5 percent compared to the same period last year.

 

"I don't think people get pregnant just to get a prize on the 12th (of June) but if the dates coincide and they give you a ... car there's nothing wrong with that," said Yuri, a 28-year-old father-to-be who declined to give his last name.

 

Last year, President Vladimir Putin called the demographic crisis the country's most acute problem and announced a broad effort to boost the birthrate, including cash subsidies for couples giving birth to more than one child. Women who give birth to their second or third child receive $10,000 vouchers to pay for education or home repairs.

 

In Ulyanovsk, everyone who has a baby in a local hospital on June 12 gets some kind of prize. The winners of the grand prize - a locally made SUV called a UAZ-Patriot - are couples judged by a committee on criteria such as "respectability" and "commendable parenting."

 

Perhaps not surprisingly, the effort has drawn snickers. According to one joke circulating on the Internet, regional university teachers - after being ordered to draw up special activities for Wednesday - proposed covering the floors of school gymnasiums with mattresses and dimming the lights.

 

Andrei Kartuzov, who won the last "make a baby" grand prize along with his wife, Irina, said they had been planning to have another child anyway.

 

The campaign "is a good help for people, especially for those living in villages," he said. "If they hold such actions every year, then maybe we will have (more children) growing up and Russia will be bigger."

Edited September 12, 2007 by Arpa

[Arpa]

Apparently this is not the first time.

How about they do this in Armenia!

1 baby= 1 BMW, 2 babies = Mercedes, 3 babies=Humvee, and 4 babies=a years supply of Vi.... well, Apricots :ap:??

BIRTH CONTROL

 

TOL Czech Republic

14 September 2007

 

Paying people to have babies in Nagorno-Karabakh overshadows the need

to resolve an old conflict.

 

If you want to have children, France is not a bad place to start. If

that enviable national sense of style, manner and sensuality aren't

reasons enough to encourage love, the state provides generous

incentives to couples who perpetuate the Gallic stock.

 

Acknowledging a declining birth rate, Russia has also started offering

incentives to families that have a second or third child. And the

governor of the central Russian region of Ulyanovsk recently offered

cars or other prizes to couples who have a baby on the next Russian

national day, 12 June.

 

Not to be outdone, the tiny, breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh

is offering its own rewards to prolific parents. According to media

reports, the local authorities will pay $700 for the third child born

to a family, $1,000 for the fourth child, and raise the payments in

steps up to $3,000 for the 10th offspring. The Armenian news agency

ArmInfo reported this week that one Nagorno-Karabakh mother, Emilia

Poghosian, received $5,000 for giving birth to her 15th child.

 

But Nagorno-Karabakh is not France or Russia, and a parent would have

to have a certain amount of daring - or a lot of altruism - to want

to bring children into the world there. It is technically still in a

state of war with Azerbaijan. There are few jobs for young people and

access to the world beyond is limited to the narrow Lachin corridor,

a mountainous passage heavily fought over in the war between Armenia

and Azerbaijan in the early 1990s. Most students have to settle on

Armenia for a university education.

 

Nagorno-Karabakh relies almost entirely on its benefactor state,

Armenia, and Armenian diaspora communities for support. Funds raised

in the United States, France and other places with affluent and

influential Armenian communities have helped pay for roads, schools

and reconstruction projects. Some Armenians visiting their ethnic

cousins there lament that public facilities are better in the breakaway

region than their own country. Indeed, the capital Stepanakert has

a far more prosperous look than the closest Armenian town, Goris.

 

The self-declared Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh has about 140,000

residents who are technically stateless.

 

The region once had a significantly larger population, a mix of

ethnic Armenians and Azeris, when it was a semi-autonomous part of

the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. The separatist war, one of

several triggered in the Caucasus as the Soviet Union disintegrated,

created one of the largest refugee exoduses since the second world

war as Azeris fled the region and other parts of Azerbaijan that were

seized by the Armenian army.

 

LINGERING HATRED

 

Antagonisms exist in the political realm, but also in personal

relations between Armenians and Azeris that keep the conflict alive,

more than a decade after a cease-fire went into effect. To highlight

the tense relations, Azeris and Armenians got into raucous arguments

at sessions of a recent economic gathering in Poland aimed at finding

common ground on trade and business cooperation.

 

Old-guard politicians routinely use Nagorno-Karabakh for political

advantage, perpetuating the nationalist sentiments that have undermined

peace efforts. And there seems to be no letup in the tragic state

of events.

 

Armenian Prime Minister Serge Sarkisian, the favorite to succeed

President Robert Kocharian, told the National Assembly this week that

the government would ensure a "balance of forces" in the region, while

the nation's defense minister announced increased spending on weapons

and air power. Sarkisian, like the president, was a leader in the

Nagorno-Karabakh separatist movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

 

Earlier this summer, Azeri President Ilham Aliev did little to defuse

tensions when he declared that his nation was living in a "state of

war" and called for more defense spending - this in a petroleum-rich

country where nearly half of people live in poverty.

 

In July, Nagorno-Karabakh's leaders angered the Organization for

Security and Cooperation in Europe and other mediators by holding

a presidential election full of verbal attacks on Azerbaijan and

opponents of an independent republic. Mediators fear that the

heated rhetoric of the election in Nagorno-Karabakh is a harbinger

for presidential elections scheduled next year in both Armenia and

Azerbaijan.

 

Amid all this political bombast, it remains to be seen whether

couples in Nagorno-Karabakh will jump at the chance to get paid to

have babies. No doubt leaders there think there is a pressing need to

address the demographic imbalances in the region. Friendly Armenia,

with barely 3 million people, has a declining growth rate while

arch-foe Azerbaijan, with 8.1 million, has a growing population.

 

The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan killed more than 30,000 people,

and each year more people are wounded or die in mine accidents along

the militarized border. The least the leaders of today could do

for the generations of tomorrow is to ensure that the killing ends

and conciliation begins. And that's a far more lasting investment in

demographic stability than gimmicks to get people to produce children

into a troubled and uncertain environment.

Edited September 15, 2007 by Arpa

[Johannes]

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