Albi, France ? Stephanie Guiraud-Chaumeil was still in law school when her son Paul was born 14 years ago. Later came Valentine, a daughter now 10. Then Mathieu, 9, and finally little Louise, 7.

With four children to raise, and a doctor for a husband and provider, Guiraud-Chaumeil, 37, might have become a stay-at-home mother. Instead, she pursued her career, consulting on brand name and intellectual property rights. This spring, she took her professional life a step further.

After a time-consuming campaign, she was elected to the city council of Albi, a medieval city 45 miles northeast of Toulouse in the softly rolling hills of southwestern France.

Supported by an elaborate and costly network of social welfare programs designed to promote childbearing, French women such as Guiraud-Chaumeil increasingly have found it possible to combine careers with motherhood.

Largely as a result, France recently overtook Ireland as Europe’s most fertile nation, with women having an average of more than two children each at a time when most of the continent is battling a declining birthrate and a graying population.

“If I had been obliged to choose between working and having children, I probably would have chosen children,” Guiraud-Chaumeil said in an interview at city hall. “But I didn’t have to choose.”

The family-friendly measures — including long maternity leaves, child-support payments, public schooling for toddlers and even nanny subsidies — have become a heavy burden on the French budget as they have expanded over the years.

They have grown increasingly expensive for businesses as well. But even in this time of financial crisis and economic slump, when deficits are growing and leaders are looking for cuts everywhere, no one in France, from the left or the right, has proposed reducing government expenditures to promote childbearing.

Most French people traditionally have regarded a high birthrate as a promise of future economic growth and a guarantee against the imbalance between elderly retirees and active workers that threatens much of Europe.

“You couldn’t imagine bringing up an end to this system in France,” said Rachel Silvera, a specialist on women in the workplace at the University of Paris.