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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:

Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline

https://archive.is/T6thJ

Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.

After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.

But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.

Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.

The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.

The carrots are not working, so there should be sticks implemented. Not sure how, but we should make childlessness painful.

Limit dispensing of oral contraceptives to married couples with verified children. Ban abortion.

Yes, it will be tough. Lots of terrible situations will pop up. The question to be asked is, “is this worse than literally running out of people?”

Malta - a country that used to have a total ban on abortion until 2023, after which it relaxed it to allow abortion to save the life of the mother - has EU's lowest TFR.

Abortion bans are mostly worthless without contraception bans, as least as far as impact-on-tfr goes

Abortion bans are worthless when you’re a €60, two hour budget airline flight from somewhere with legal abortion.

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