Beauty is ageless. Fertility is not.” “Don’t let your sperm go up in smoke.” These were just two of the dozen social media-ready taglines for Italy’s first Fertility Day on September 22, an initiative launched by Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin. Sporting the bawdy logo of a sperm swimming towards an egg on a rose-colored heart, the initiative was meant to inform Italians of the ideal age and lifestyle for having children. Its official website also included an arcade-style game (intended for 25-to-35-year-old adults) where the player, either a sperm or an egg, dodges syringes, alcohol, and junk food to successfully reach its match. The social media initiative was intended to be lighthearted; the Italian public’s response was anything but.
Facebook and Twitter users reacted to Fertility Day mockingly, replacing the original quotes on the campaign clipart with a snarky “remember to piss off.” But the public’s response quickly turned from ridicule to frustration, elevating the discussion to the national news cycle and labeling Lorenzin’s initiative as “medieval,” “demented,” and “a masterpiece in superficiality.” The campaign is only a minor part of the Health Ministry’s pro-family initiatives (Prime Minister Matteo Renzi claims he was not even aware of its existence), but the program’s ineptitude made Italians question the government’s pro-fertility policies as a whole. The Fertility Day fiasco reflects a common predicament for the European Union, where countries wrongly assume that more general funding and public relations campaigns will make up for poor long-term planning in pro-family policies.
Italy has a population problem. It has one of the lowest fertility rates in the EU, with the average woman giving birth to 1.37 children, compared to the EU average of 1.58. And EU birth rates across the board are far under the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman needed to keep the population stable. But Italy’s predicament is especially dire: It has one of the world’s fastest aging populations, leading to a growing number of retirees and a shrinking workforce. According to Lorenzin, if the trend is not reversed by 2024, Italy’s welfare system may have to be drastically altered to adjust for falling tax incomes, reducing the benefits guaranteed to each citizen.
Lorenzin’s Fertility Day campaign does, in a way, target a challenge to natality: Many Italian couples decide to have children too late. Italy’s National Plan for Fertility – of which Fertility Day was a part – is a response to the phenomenon of too many women waiting to have children after age 35, when child-bearing becomes anatomically more difficult. According to the think tank Etica ed Economia, natality has fallen in part due to “postponement syndrome,” in which couples wait for secure jobs and financial stability before having their first child, increasing the likelihood of infertility and pregnancy related issues. In the 1970s, the average Italian mother had her first child at 24. By 2005, she waited until 33. Hence, the average couple is more likely to be sterile when it decides to have children.
Yet the public’s criticism highlights frustration with the government’s presumption that couples are just not having children earlier due to ignorance about infertility-related issues. In reality, young Italian couples simply cannot afford to start a family. Italy’s meager recovery from the recent recession has largely ignored prospective parents, and earlier this year 25- to 35-year-olds, the age group most likely to have children, face a stubbornly high unemployment rate of 17.9 percent. They receive average net salaries of little over a thousand euros a month after a decade in the workforce, barely enough to sustain themselves, let alone children.
Countries often experience an increase in birthrates as a product of a rise in salaries, so continued economic stagnation is a serious problem for Italy’s natality goals. The country’s fertility rate actually improved in the 1990s as gender gaps narrowed and women started filling the same jobs as men, giving more couples the financial means to raise children. But a shrinking gender gap alone does not balance out the economic challenges of having a child. To break the spell of dangerously low natality rates, Italy must emulate its neighbor on the other side of the Alps: France.
France’s high fertility rate ranks fourth amongst OECD nations, with the average woman having 2.01 children. Some of its success relates to the country’s gender equality – 88.8 percent of French women aged 25 to 54 are employed, compared to 77.1 percent in Italy. But even more powerful is the amount of state assistance to new mothers. France spends 3.5 percent of its GDP on family welfare policies, similar to Scandinavian countries. Italy spends a meager 2 percent, partially explaining why the government churned out an initiative as laughable as Fertility Day: It lacks the funds to implement more meaningful projects.
Renzi’s government is attempting to catch up to France, albeit with a few stumbles. As a largely symbolic measure, Renzi’s coalition introduced a baby bonus in late 2014 to soften the economic burden of new children. Inspired by a 2005 policy from former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Renzi’s government set aside half a billion euros yearly for the next three years to fund cash subsidies for families under a certain income level having their first child. The subsidy comes out to just 80 euros a month, or 160 euros if a family has a second child, for the first three years of the child’s life. Now, Health Minister Lorenzin proposes to double the subsidy and expand the project, parsing out 320 euros to families who have a second child and extending the benefit to expecting mothers in their seventh month of pregnancy.
However, the subsidies still pale in comparison to the costs of raising a newborn. As French Minister for Families, Children, and Women’s Rights Laurence Rossignol told her Italian counterpart, what pushes families to have more children is not a single new measure like the baby bonus, but the “stability of all [pro-family] measures.” Prospective families consider the cost of raising a child far past its first three years, so any policy solution must also guarantee lasting support to families.
According to natality policy experts, what brings France its unparalleled success is its extensive childcare system. Most mothers cannot afford stay at home past their 16-week maternity leave, so couples are more willing to have babies in places where there are formal structures available to care for pre-school age toddlers.
The correlation between childcare support and fertility rates is more evident when examining Europe as a whole. An article from the Guardian points out that “the map of fertility rates in the EU is remarkably similar to that of childcare facilities.” In France, the Nordic countries, Belgium, and Holland, childcare availability has surpassed an EU goal set for 2010, and fertility rates are higher than the EU average. In southern European countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece that cannot afford the costs of childcare infrastructure as well as countries in the EU’s western sector like Germany and Austria that are culturally more averse to the idea of childcare as a state responsibility, birth rates are below the EU average. Over half of France’s toddlers have access to some sort of collective care, although the number of actual traditional nursery spots available remains low at 16 percent.
It must be noted that Italy, like France, places a strong focus on state-sponsored childcare, and the regions on the peninsula with the highest fertility rates are the ones where locally run childcare systems are most extensive. Still, the country only provides official childcare solutions for 40 percent of all toddlers; 42.3 percent of Italian parents resort to leaving toddlers with grandparents or use other do-it-yourself childcare solutions. Demand for more formal and reliable structures far outstrips supply. Childcare systems are currently run at the regional and county level, and state assistance has failed to help regions with less developed systems catch up to their northern counterparts.
“A thousand nurseries in a thousand days.” This promise, one of Matteo Renzi’s battle calls after his sudden appointment as prime minister, has reemerged partly due to the public scrutiny of Fertility Day. Over two years since this initiative’s announcement, the promised new structures, which would have augmented the number of nursery spots in Italy by a third, are nowhere to be found. Furthermore, disparity in access to nurseries – the preferred childcare structure amongst EU parents – between regions remains stark: There are spots for 40 percent of toddlers in left-leaning, wealthy Emilia-Romagna in the north, but only room for two percent of toddlers in poorer, less-industrialized Calabria in the south.
There is also little progress to show for the 100 million euros Italy set aside in 2015 to expand nursery coverage. Years’ worth of development funds from the EU have also not been used for their intended purpose. The funds were ultimately released to regional budgets and likely used to plug holes in other welfare-related projects, given that regions are not required to distribute budgets as per the state’s recommendations and fiscal austerity continues to put the funding for many other programs in jeopardy.
Regions and counties have often disregarded the national government’s calls to build new nurseries because funds only suffice for building childcare facilities, not maintaining them. The Italian government still lacks a long-term framework that allows agencies to meet the demand for new nurseries without facing budget cuts in other programs.
Fortunately, forthcoming changes indicate that Italy is ready to think smarter about how it uses pro-family funds, as exemplified by Minister of Families Percio Costa’s new slogan: “Rationalize, reorganize, reorder.” While not the sexiest of directives, Costa’s motto on how to manage the childcare budget within the constraints of limited spending may have further-reaching effects than Renzi’s calls for more funding. An upcoming school reform, not yet put up for a parliamentary vote, will overhaul the way early childcare and educational facilities like nurseries and preschools are paid for by the state. Legislators hope this will push counties to build urgently-needed nurseries, since upkeep costs will no longer weigh on local budgets.
It will take more than a few hashtags for Italy to catch up to France’s decades-long baby boom. Nevertheless, the ire following Fertility Day shows that Italy’s – and Europe’s – fertility problem is not a question of mentality, but of money. As younger Europeans face stagnant salaries and heavier work burdens, the state must provide lasting solutions that allow women to maintain a work-life balance. More budget accountability on its own could be enough for Italy to begin expanding its childcare coverage. Once its bloated bureaucracy starts distributing money more efficiently, it can finally drop the gaudy clipart and embarrassing taglines like those of Fertility Day for actual solutions to help families conceive children in real life, not just in a computer game.