The Museum of the Innocents in Florence has an unusual name and houses an unusual exhibition: a collection of small broken objects, mostly medallions. They were torn in two when a baby arrived at the hospital for abandoned children in old Florence. One half of the object, known as the segnale di riconoscimento, was kept in the children’s hospital (actually an orphanage), while the other remained in the hands of the mother. That way, should she want to claim the child, she would have proof that she was his. Many of the children had been born out of wedlock; but others came from families with no means to feed a new mouth.
The segnali are reminders of a time when Italy had an excess of births. Today, as in many other European countries, hardly any children are born. Its fertility rate (average number of children per woman) has dropped from 2.66 in 1964 to 1.24 in 2020. In one region, Sardinia, it is below 1. That makes Italy part of the fertility band ultra-low that covers all of southern Europe, from Portugal and Spain (1.40 and 1.19) in the west to Greece and Cyprus (1.39 and 1.36) in the east. Since 2.1 children per woman are needed to keep the numbers stable, those countries must have more children, admit more immigrants or see their populations decline.
Only the first of these options attracts European right-wing populists. So they look for ways to persuade indigenous women to have larger families. Few have put as much emphasis on birth rates as the Brothers of Italy, the far-right party whose leader, Giorgia Meloni, is the country’s new prime minister. The call for Italians to multiply stems in part from the party’s opposition to unauthorized immigration. “Support for birth and family” heads the list of 15 political objectives of his electoral program.
Constrained by Italy’s massive gross public debt, which hovers at 147% of GDP, the Meloni government has so far had little room to make its goals a reality. However, the budget for next year includes some changes that, according to what Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti has pointed out, are only a beginning. These include an increase in benefits for the first child and for families with more than three children; a modest extension of maternity leave; VAT reductions on baby products; and changes to the retirement age so that the more children a woman has, the sooner she can retire.
In the New Right worldview, feminism has spawned generations of women who would rather work and play than raise children. However, that account ignores two crucial facts. The first is that the most decidedly feminist countries, those in northern Europe, now have some of the highest birth rates on the continent. And the second is that women are often not opposed to having children; they have less than they say they want, mostly for economic reasons.
In global terms, a fairly robust law has long linked national wealth and birth rates: As countries get richer, birth rates fall. However, a group of researchers from London’s Center for Economic Policy Research argues that the opposite is now the case among the richest countries. In the OECD, a club made up mainly of rich countries, there is now a positive correlation between GDP per capita and fertility (see chart). The most likely explanation is complex. As women enter the labor market, they increase economic output with their labor and talent. It is also possible that they vote for governments that invest money in facilitating the reconciliation of family and work. Spending on family support is also positively correlated with fertility. Generous paid maternity leave is one such policy; and the evidence supporting childcare spending is even stronger. If women do not have the facilities to work in the first years of a child’s life, the dilemma between work and family remains immovable.
In Malta (once said to be “more Catholic than the Pope” and now has the lowest fertility rate in Europe at 1.13), women are still 30 times more likely than men to stop working to take care of the family. The tension between money, career and family can be acute. Marie Briguglio, a former high-level official, decided to postpone the birth of her only child until she was 38 years old. It was, according to her, an opportunity cost: if they had had children before, her promotion in the administration would have been jeopardized.
“I played the lottery every week after the birth of my second child,” says Inés, a small business owner in Madrid. In the end, she was not awarded a winning ticket, so she decided not to have a third child as she would have liked. In Spain, the difference between the number of children born (1.19 per woman) and the number desired (around two) is one of the highest in Europe. Alícia Adserà, an economist at Princeton University, looks for explanations beyond those directly related to the family (such as child care, maternity leave, tax deductions for children or men’s housework). She claims that more general conditions (particularly the labor market) also play a key role.
The Spanish women launched into education and work after the end of the National-Catholic dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who died in 1975. The country then built a large number of nurseries and today subsidizes them with a monthly bonus. The Spanish maternity leave (16 weeks) is quite stingy by European standards; but men are entitled at the same time as women. Grandparents help a lot with the children, and for families with more means, immigration (particularly from Latin America) is an affordable source of babysitters.
Despite all this, Spain’s backward position begins in another crucial area: opportunities for young people. The youth unemployment rate is one of the highest in the rich world, at around 35%. As revealed by a study from 2008-2016, young Spaniards worked for almost eight years chaining temporary contracts before getting a permanent one. That delays both marriage and motherhood; almost half of young people between the ages of 25 and 34 now live with their parents. When Spaniards marry, they have been enjoying the freedoms of childless adulthood for a decade. About a fifth of women end up childless, contributing greatly to the overall decline in fertility. The average age of women who decide to become mothers for the first time, 31 years, is one of the highest in Europe, along with Italy and Malta. Many stop there; single-child families are so common that the conservative newspaper El Mundo envisioned a future country “without brothers or sisters.”
Late onset of childbearing may be an important factor in low overall fertility. In any case, an article by Poh Lin Tan, from the National University of Singapore, points out that in that country the series of financial incentives offered to parents has failed to stop the continued decline in fertility, which reached 1.16 in 2018. Tan argues that lowering the childbearing age is the “best short-term option” for policymaking.
However, this requires economic opportunities, says Adserà. Those opportunities can translate into a large number of stable jobs; for example, in the public sector, as in the Nordic countries. (In general, women are often overrepresented in the public sector.) Or they can take the form of dynamic labor markets, where a lost job has a good chance of being replaced, perhaps by a better one, as in the United States, Great Britain or Australia, where fertility is higher than in southern Europe.
However, what seems clear is that simple bribes to have children (whether in the form of one-time bonuses, monthly gifts or tax breaks) are not enough. More generally, says Frank Furedi of MCC, a Hungarian government-funded think tank, “pro-natalist policies just don’t work.” The case of Poland seems similar; the government of that country established a generous monthly child benefit in 2016, but has not seen an increase in babies born. The best thing that countries can do is act to make reconciling work and family less difficult. As the Georgia Meloni government studies new measures for Italy, the political temptation will be to announce “pro-family” policies. However, what young couples really want are job opportunities, support and choice. If all of them are available, many more will take advantage of the possibility of choosing to have more children.
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Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix