Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
A southern Italian region is pioneering subsidised egg-freezing for healthy women, while the central government is planning to promote fertility testing — the latest initiatives aimed at improving the country’s precipitous birth rate.
Puglia, which is governed by the centre-left opposition to the rightwing government led by Giorgia Meloni, has allocated €900,000 to what it calls “social freezing”. Under the plan, low-income residents aged between 27 and 37 can apply for up to €3,000 towards the cost of extracting their eggs, and freezing them for potential in vitro fertilisation later.
“It was a necessity to do this for women to counter lack of births,” Valentina Romano, director of Puglia’s welfare department, told state broadcaster Rai. “It’s widely known that the biological clock and the social clock do not coincide. This is a useful instrument to give women the chance to realise the dream of motherhood.”
The Puglia initiative is the first time Italy is using public funds for egg-freezing for non-medical reasons. But any use of their eggs for IVF will require women to be married to a man, as Italy has long prohibited women who are single or in a same-sex partnership from having babies via in vitro fertilisation.
The move comes after Italy’s birth rate — the average number of children born to women in their lifetime — fell to 1.18 in 2024, the lowest level since comparable data began being collected in 1952.
Meloni’s government has described the demographic crisis as one of the country’s biggest challenges that is weighing on its economy and the sustainability of the pension and social welfare systems. Nearly a quarter of Italy’s population is over 65, with just 12 per cent below the age of 14.
“Italy is ageing; birth rates are falling; entire areas of the country are emptying,” finance minister Giancarlo Giorgetti told parliament this week. “These merciless numbers must become a spur to action.”
Rome has tried to encourage childbirth with financial incentives like child allowances and tax cuts on nappies, infant formula and car seats for children, but to no avail. Now, politicians are zooming in on trying to influence women and their life choices, albeit within traditional families.
While Puglia promotes egg-freezing, the government in Rome has decided to allocate €3.5mn for a three-year campaign to encourage young women to undergo ovarian reserve tests, a key marker of fertility.
Brothers of Italy lawmaker Augusta Montaruli, the driving force behind the initiative, argues it will empower young women to plan their lives better. The campaign is likely to start later this year.
“This is a measure to support women’s awareness and their health,” she told the Financial Times. “An incorrect narrative has developed in the last 30 years that you can become a mother naturally, at any time, at any age. This is not the case.”
“I understand the desire and pain of a person who has always thought ‘I can have a child at any time,’ and then finds out it’s not like that,” said Montaruli, who, at age 41, is pregnant with her first child, which she called “a miracle”.
However, Maria Rita Testa, a demography professor at Rome’s Luiss University, said subsidised egg-freezing and fertility testing may not have much impact, unless authorities tackle the economic factors that now discourage people from having babies.
“Economic reasons are much more important than health difficulties,” Testa said. “If you do not allow families to be richer and more well established in the labour market as a whole, you will hardly see the impact of such measures on the fertility rates.”
In a recent survey of Italian women by the United Nations Population Fund, 30 per cent said job insecurity and unemployment led to them having fewer children than they wanted; 14 per cent cited housing problems; and 12 per cent cited lack of childcare; though 15 per cent did cite difficulties in conceiving and infertility.
“You can allow people to have children later on,” Testa said, “but they will not have children even at a more advanced reproductive age if they don’t feel secure.”
Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi in Rome
