Politics
Monday December 23, 2002
ITALY'S BIRTH RATE PLUMMETS
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ROME, December 23, 2002 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Despite tax-funded childcare and paid leave for both parents, Italians are now competing with Spaniards for the world's lowest birthrate. With birthrates around half of the 2.1 child-per-woman replacement rate, the European Union reports that Europe can expect to "suffer a net loss of as many as 70 million people by 2050.
"Most people don't understand how bad it is," Valerio Terra Abrami, a senior demographer at Italy's Institute of National Statistics, told reporters. "Every year I give one or two interviews saying the same thing, but nothing happens." Only with the advent of the centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi has Parliament brought in a bill to pay families a $500 monthly incentive during the first two years of each child's life.
Since the advent of revolutionary anti-clerical nationalism in Italy in the 1840s -- but particularly following the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s -- a growing number of Italians have stopped practising the Catholic faith. Last month, Pope John Paul II, in his first-ever speech to Parliament, called the collapsing birthrate a "crisis" and "another grave threat that bears upon the future of this country..."
To read a media report see:
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/4797685.htm
For related coverage see:
SCOTTISH BIRTH RATE HITS ALL TIME LOW
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2002/oct/02103009.html
UK BIRTH RATE PLUMMETS
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2002/jun/02062804.html
FERTILITY RATES: CANADA IN DECLINE BUT U.S. ON THE RISE
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2002/jul/02070404.html
HEALTH MINISTER SAYS "JAPANESE RACE" WILL SOON BE EXTINCT
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2002/may/02052406.html
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