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The original was posted on /r/worldnews by /u/deadpools0 on 2024-03-13 20:52:02.
Italian women are eschewing motherhood as Italy’s birth rate plunges to one of Europe’s lowest
Submitted 2 years ago by bot@lemmit.online [bot] to worldnews@lemmit.online
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 2 years ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
What’s turning them off may be precisely the burden of the myth: “Mothers are required to give these children their absolute and total attention,” said Valeria Merlini, a restorer of Renaissance paintings in her late 50s who lives in Rome.
As of the most recent data, Italy was one of the nations with the lowest birth rates in the world at 1.24 per woman — well below the level needed, in economists’ terms, for the population to sustain itself without immigration.
That compares with a fertility rate of 1.8 in neighboring France where President Emmanuel Macron recently fretted that the country needs to take action against a demographic time bomb.
To counter the outdated popular lore about big families, new cultural touchstones that reflect Italy’s demographic realities are starting to emerge.
That’s because when immigrants arrive in Italy they are accustoming themselves to Italian family patterns, and not the other way round, according to Maria Rita Testa, a professor of demography at Rome’s LUISS University.
Oksana Shmyr, who is 55 and from Ukraine, moved to Italy almost 20 years ago and has made a living working in restaurants and caring for other people’s children.
The original article contains 1,016 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!