La fecondità

Italy today has very low fecundity fertility rates with a 1.29 average per woman in 2019. This is the result of fertility dynamics that stretch back to the 1970s, and that have included: the ‘baby bust’ of the mid 1990s; a modest rise with the new century; and then a new decline with the Great Recession (see figure). In the last twenty years low, if fluctuating, Italian fertility has seen a constant rise in the mother’s average age at childbirthchildbearing: the average now stands at over 32. This, of course, puts first births at greater risk and means that there is less time for subsequent births. Since the ‘timid reprise’ of the early 2000s, we have now passed to a ‘time of uncertainty’, uncertainty which involves not just work and economics but the family; into which we must now factor the pandemic. Prospective parents naturally postpone reproductive choices in the face of this kind of uncertainty. If Central-Northern Italy and foreign mothers drove the modest fertility recovery of twenty years ago, these are now dragging the fertility trend down: levels were already low, note, in the south. Even the fertility of foreign women is falling, with an average of below two children per woman. In recent years the annual number of births has also fallen sharply (from almost 580,000 in 2008 to 420,000 in 2019). The smaller generations of the last years are not only the result of low fertility today. They are born of past low fertility: prospective parents are no longer the baby-boomers who came into the world in the ‘fertile’ 1960s, but those born in the 1980s, 1990s when fertility was already reduced, with only a small increment thanks to young immigrants. Italy is in the downward spiral of “fertility trap”, which will also affect the future. Newborns now will be potential parents tomorrow. And, in the next two decades, the number of women of child-bearing age is expected to fall by more than two million. So radical will be the fall that even if fertility increases, the number of births will continue to fall. Compared to other developed countries, Italy has long been characterised by low female participation in the labour market, marked gender inequality in domestic and care work, and low public spending in favour of families: all of these factors discourage fertility. During the Covid-19 pandemic these characteristics inevitably had effects. Indeed, inequalities and fragility in the Italian ‘family-friendly’ welfare model have reached a critical juncture and there has been a move towards public intervention for the support of families with children, childcare services and measures to reconcile family and work. There was also the call for a generous provision of special resources for young adults so as to mitigate the negative consequences of economic uncertainty.