EU-Policies and Fertility: The Emergence of Fertility-Related Family Policies at the Supra-National Level

The paper deals with fertility relevant policy initiatives at the European level. During the past decade the EU has set several initiatives concerning fertility issues. It is not clear whether these mark the emergence of a new policy field within the EU. To assess this issue we collected EU documents related to fertility relevant policy issues and quantified their development over time. We distinguished between binding and non-binding acts, and we analysed the key topics and frames of the EU documents collected in our dataset. The analysis shows that EU activities related to fertility relevant family policies have increased over time, both with respect to binding and non-binding initiatives. It further shows that the recent fertility-focused initiatives are embedded in policy frames and topics which to a large extent have been part of the core of European Union politics since its onset.