Abortion has consequences.
The Italian health minister gave a recent interview in which she said Italy is a “dying country.” Why? Because abortion has depleted the European nation of its next generations and caused a massive baby shortage.
While some abortion advocates decry overpopulation, Italy’s birth rate has fallen to its lowest level – 8.4 per 1,000 people — since 1861.
Beatrice Lorenzin, the minister of health, said: “We are at the threshold where people who die are not being replaced by newborns. That means we are a dying country. This situation has enormous implications for every sector: the economy, society, health, pensions, just to give a few examples.”
The number of births per 1,000 people has fallen to just 8.4, down from 38.3 when Italy’s territories and kingdoms were unified a century and a half ago.
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In Britain and the United States, the figures are 12 and 13 respectively.
Last year 509,000 babies were born in Italy, 5,000 fewer than in 2013.
The Catholic Herald newspaper commented on the new figures and Lorenzin’s quote:
It may seem a statement of the obvious, but there are fewer children around because people do not want to have children. The children they might have had have been aborted, or they never came to be in the first place because of contraception. Indeed, if you were to factor in all the aborted children, and to imagine for a moment they had lived, then Italy’s population would not be in decline. The invaluable Wikipedia tells us that in 2010 the abortion rate in Italy was 10 per 1000 women of childbearing age. If you look at this table, it seems that around 20 to 25% of all pregnancies in Italy end in abortion, though I am no mathematician, let alone a statistician.
So the minster’s words about the challenge posed by the declining birth rate can also be read as words about the challenge posed by the high abortion rate. And the same would be true, by extension, of contraception. The Telegraph article speaks of 40% of couples not having any children at all.
Unless this trend is reversed, Italy, as it presently exists, is doomed. Again, I am not a statistician, but I do know that trends never continue quite as you expect them to. Italy probably is not a dying nation, but whatever the future, its present is certainly problematic.
