Italy PM vows to boost birthrate
Reported May 13, 2008
ROME – Italy’s new Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi vowed today to encourage families to have children with a plan that he said would also remove “material reasons” for women to have abortions.
Berlusconi, in his maiden speech before parliament four weeks after triumphing in Italy’s general elections, promised “new and important expenditures for demographic development.”
The conservative leader gave no details of the plan, but said it would “remove the material reasons for abortion,” a remark that suggested that he was not inclined to challenge current legislation.
Abortion was an issue during the April election campaign, when a right-wing journalist, Giuliano Ferrera, ran under an anti-abortion banner, but he won less than one percent of the vote.
Yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI said the 1978 law legalising abortion had “inflicted a new wound” on Italian society.
Health ministry statistics for the period from 2003 to 2007 showed a three percent drop in abortions per year in Italy, from 131,018 to 127,038. The ministry estimated backstreet abortions at some 15,000 per year.
Italy’s population is the greyest in the European Union, second only to Japan, with the highest “ageing index,” according to the Italian National Statistics Institute (Istat).
The index counts the number of people over 65 for every 100 who are under 18. Italy scored 141 to Japan’s 154 on the index in 2006, Istat said.
Birthrate figures improved slightly between 1995 and 2005, from 1.19 births per woman to 1.32, but this was the result almost entirely of immigration, Istat said.