“But what state and what birth rate, you will have no use for reproduction.” This is the banner, signed “Rudeness” that a group made up of around ten girls, their faces covered with a fuchsia handkerchief, showed in front of the building of the Emilia-Romagna Region, where the Bolognese stage of the Birth Tour, organized by the States General of Natality and Natality Foundation. The demonstration, completely peaceful, lasted a few minutes and some activists took turns using the megaphone to contest the line adopted by the meeting.
Roccella: “16 billion net benefits granted to families”
“We have already done a lot for the birth rate, so much so that the Parliamentary Budget Office, which, as we know, is always very attentive to fact-checking, verified that for 2024 the Meloni government had favored families with 16 billion inhabitants. net profits”, declared Eugenia Maria Roccella, Minister of Family, Birth and Equal Opportunities, who spoke at the Bologna stadium. “Of course, there is always a lot to do and that is why we will continue on this path, trying to continue to encourage families and in particular to give women and couples the freedom to have a second child – added the minister – because the surveys reveal this. We believe that couples actually want two children, but that sometimes they have the first but almost never have the second. It is for this reason that “we have granted benefits targeted specifically to the second child”. Roccella spoke of a series of initiatives “which do not only concern the birth rate”. He recalled “an initiative like that of Mimit on family restaurants”, and “the pact with restaurants to offer menus at low prices for children in order to also allow families to go out together for lunch and dinner.” And finally “the most obvious benefits for working mothers with their second child, such as free childcare and increased parental leave in the first budget and the second. In the first budget, we allocated one and a half billion to this type of measures and in the second an additional billion”
The data: 1.25 children per family
“Italy finds itself in a situation of persistent low birth rate: for more than 40 years the average number of children per woman, which should be around 2 to guarantee adequate generational renewal, is around 1.5 . The data is even lower because we have fallen below the level of one and a quarter children per woman,” said Alessandro Rosina, full professor of demography and statistics at the Catholic University of Milan, upon his arrival at the first stage of the Bologna Natality Tour, organized by the Natality States General and the Natality Foundation. “We are among the European countries struggling the most to reverse the trend and we risk falling into a demographic trap – continues Rosina – On the one hand, the elderly population tends to increase thanks to greater longevity, we must therefore take up the challenge of guaranteeing the conditions of care and assistance, on the other hand we have fewer and fewer people in working age and the potential labor force share of the population is therefore reduced. This slows down economic growth but also the Italian social system as a whole.” “Italy is one of the countries in Europe which experiences a greater imbalance of this type – said Rosina – and must find solutions to remedy it”.
Read also:
