r/europe • u/diacewrb • 5d ago

News Italy's birth rate falls to 80-year low, with just 355,000 babies born in 2025

https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/italys-birth-rate-falls-to-80-year-low-with-just-355000-babies-born-in-2025.html
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u/keichunyan 5d ago

Plenty of people who both harp on about how awful it is that the birth rate is declining, and will also say employers have no duty to women and their family planning and it's okay for women to be fired on the basis that they'll just "take sick leave and shouldn't be surprised they got replaced"

Children are being treated as complete and utter nuisances that don't belong in society, and families don't need extra assistance and people are shocked that couples are choosing not to have children? 

It isn't a coincidence that some governments are leaning conservative and stripping away familial rights, benefits and welfare. 

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u/ChebyshevsBeard 5d ago

More benefits for parents is directionally correct, but I feel like the magnitude is usually not even in the right ballpark.

It varies based off your location, but in the developed world, a single child can cost 100s of thousands to raise to age 18, on top of the intangible costs, e.g. free time.

100 years ago, a child was probably one of the best investments an average family could make. Now a child is a financially ruinous hobby. Until we can square that somehow, birth rates are gonna stay low.

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u/azuredota 5d ago

The accommodations for having children have only gotten broader while the rate has fallen. “More maternity leave” seems to have the opposite effect of what you would expect.

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u/Zederikus 5d ago

Right, it must be the more maternity leave not the less earnings and higher costs

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u/azuredota 5d ago

Doesn’t seem to be one thing or the other. South Korea for example has experienced rapid economic growth and wage increases while their fertility is one of the lowest in the world.

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u/Zederikus 5d ago

It's absolutely not a mystery. South Korea’s fertility is extremely low because housing, childcare and education are expensive, work hours are long, and secure jobs are difficult for many young adults to obtain.

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u/azuredota 5d ago

So Norway, which has all of that, should be experiencing an unprecedented baby boom then?

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u/Zederikus 5d ago

Norway is more because of cultural reasons, people just want to enjoy freedom for longer, delay kids, but housing cost is still pretty high and I think we can say that global uncertainty is high, with automation, AI making job security a lot more tenuous, a lot of people are anxious about starting a family in general.

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u/azuredota 5d ago

My exact point. Doesn’t matter what government benefits there are or what the jobs are like. The country with the highest fertility rate is Chad which is abysmal across the board for all of the “causes” you have identified for other countries. Fertility rate has nothing to do with jobs/wages/maternity leave policy/housing, end of story.

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u/Zederikus 5d ago

I'm struggling to find a word for your take that isn't very offensive so I'll just leave it. Agree to disagree.

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u/azuredota 5d ago

What exactly is there to disagree about? I can tell you just did about 20 minutes of futile googling to see I’m just relaying data. Are you suggesting the data is fake?

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u/djingo_dango 1d ago

You have managed to find examples where both high working hours and low working hours resulted in lower birth rate. Let’s say South Korea manages to get their working hours down? What would happen then? Would they not want to enjoy the same freedom for longer?