Italian PM hits out at government-led fertility campaign

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has criticised a campaign promoted by his health minister that encourages couples to have more children.

The Fertility Day campaign is aimed at tackling Italy’s ageing population, and its adverts include one of a woman holding an hourglass next to the words: “Beauty has no age limit. Fertility does”.

The campaign website shows water dripping and the words “fertility is a common good” and a man holding up a half-burned cigarette with the words “Don’t let your sperm go up in smoke”.

However, Renzi said in a radio interview that none of his friends had decided to have children after seeing an advert, and that stable jobs and day care were the key to boosting Italy’s population.

“If you want to create a society that invests in its future and has children, you have to make sure the underlying conditions are there,” he added.

Health minister Beatrice Lorenzin, who in May described the decline in Italy’s birth rate as “apocalyptic”, has now ordered changes to the online campaign.

“We did not intend to offend or provoke anyone. If the message has not gone across as we would have liked we will change it,” she said.

The campaign was launched on Wednesday, and was instantly lambasted by critics on social media as being patronising and sexist.

One woman on Twitter asked “Which century is it again?”, while another said “Appalled. Sure. Italian women are all waiting for the storks, aren’t they?”

Other Italians likened it to Mussolini’s proclamation in the 1930s that it was the social duty of women to have children.

Only 488,000 babies were born in Italy in 2015, fewer than in any year since the modern state was founded in 1861. Its fertility rate last year stood at 1.35 children per woman, lower than the EU average of 1.6.