“My friends all smell like weed
/ or little babies”
—Taylor Swift on life in her early thirties
One of the first and most stark cultural differences I noticed between California and Italy was the attitude toward marriage and babies.
From 24-30 my friends in Southern California were engaged or getting married, racing to get their lives started, building the infrastructure of their own version of the American dream (which almost always includes a home, a 401k, marriage and children) while my friends in Italy would spray Aperol through their noses if you even brought up marriage (let alone little babies). That’s something I won’t even think about until 30.
Where I’m from the pattern seems to be: get married in your mid to late twenties, then after a couple of years, have babies. Of course, in larger cities in the U.S. like LA & NYC the average shifts more toward your early/mid-thirties, as personal freedom and career advancement are prioritized.
But in Italy, the pattern seems to instead be to have a long-term partner throughout your thirties, then around age 39 or 40 decide to have a baby. After a few years of being parents together, you might consider marrying your partner, or instead continue cohabitating. (In Italy it seems the institution of marriage is built around the child and is thus unnecessary until children come into the picture; marriage exists for the family rather than for the couple.)
My curiosity about this difference in the various perceptions of a “normal age” and even a healthy age to get pregnant was roused when I saw the following videos a few days apart: one addressing an Italian audience implying that pregnancy in your early thirties is radically young—and the other seeking to comfort an American audience with the idea that pregnancy in your early thirties is actually not too late and there may be benefits.
[The first woman says: “I’m 30 years old. I’m too young to have a kid.”
Then it pans to her friends who are all in their 30s with children.
Then the first woman lip syncs, “Don’t wanna hear you”, a line from the Backstreet Boys song “I Want It That Way”.]
In other words, the Italian perspective suggests that giving birth in your early thirties is similar to giving birth in your early twenties in America: it happens, but it’s a little early. (Cue Ilana from Broad City describing herself as a child bride at 27.)
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
How is something scientific, like fertility, perceived so differently across cultures?
To the point where intelligent women in one environment feel it’s too soon to have kids in their early thirties, and intelligent women in another environment feel they must justify why it’s not too late to have kids during the same exact time frame?
As far as I’m aware, the science of fertility doesn’t change across cultures.
FIRST OF ALL, THE MYTH OF THE CLIFF
I used to have this belief that having kids after 30 was dangerous, then after 35, you were *at risk* and with a grimace. Yes, fertility declines over time, but gradually: there is no cliff drop after 30; there is no cliff drop after 35. Decrease in fertility is moderate, not sudden, and this is why the cliff is a myth. Unfortunately this myth inspires a lot of fear-based decision making and a lot of women saying “now or never” when actually the situation isn’t as extreme as they think.
Taken from Arwa Mahdawi’s piece in The Guardian “It is time to reassess our obsession with women’s fertility and the number 35”:
“The quality of your eggs declines over time, that’s very clear, but the current obsession with the age 35 as a fertility threshold is outdated and unscientific. Take, for example, the oft-cited statistic that one in three women aged 35-39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying. Want to know where that statistic is from? Data from 1700s France. Researchers looked at a bunch of church birth records from people whose life expectancy at the time was around 30, and came up with these statistics.
LOL. Ummmmmm.
Mahdawi continues:
“However, since this statistic serves the very useful purpose of shaming and scaring women it was parroted endlessly. One study published in 2004 that looked at 770 European women found that, with sex at least twice a week, 78% of women aged 35 to 40 conceived within a year, compared with 84% of women aged 20 to 34…Our current obsession with the age of 35 being a fertility cliff isn’t just unscientific, it’s unhelpful.”
She goes on to talk about the fact that the biological clock of men is something that instead isn’t exaggerated, or really discussed at all.
“I’m afraid sperm doesn’t exactly age like a fine wine; sperm quality declines as men get older. Studies have shown that babies born to older fathers have been found to have an increased likelihood of health issues, psychiatric problems and cognitive disorders. Men can be solely responsible for 20%-30% of infertility cases and contribute to 50% of cases overall, according to one study. You don’t get many men in their 30s stressing about freezing their sperm to preserve its quality though, do you?
I’m not trying to suggest we shame men for waiting “too long” to have a kid, by the way. It’s just time we stop shaming women.”
Dr. Alson Burke, an OB-GYN at UW Medicine says: “We know a little under half of infertility cases are male-related, half are female-related and then 20-30% are undiagnosed or unexplained.”
The irony is that all this fear and stress and blame can possibly cause more health complications than the actual age of the woman. Each woman and her pregnancy is singular and should be treated within her own individual life context rather than put into a box based solely on her age.
Also in case you’re wondering:
Most miscarriages happen in the first 13 weeks of pregnancy, and your chance of miscarriage by age can increase:
Under 30 years, your chance is 10%
Aged 23 to 39, your chance is up to 20%
By age 45, your chance is 50%
As the egg quality declines, the risk of chromosomal abnormalities increases.
The risk of Down syndrome does increase once you hit your mid-30s however, research shows that risks do not accelerate massively once you hit 35 years.
Instead, it tends to be a slow increase every year after age 30:
If you’re 25, you have about a 1 in 1,250 chance
At 35, you have about a 1 in 400 chance
At 45, it becomes a 1 in 30 chance
There is still much research to be done regarding fertility (surprise surprise) but women are choosing to have children later and are able to because we have the ability to live longer, healthier lives, as well as new science like egg freezing. We don’t need more science conducted by men in the 1700s (and we definitely don’t need a room full of men debating what’s best for women).
So if the cliff is a myth, why is there such a massive difference in cultural attitudes about healthy, safe, and normal ages to give birth between the U.S. and Italy?
THEORY ONE: The goddamn economy
The most immediate answer might be that, though Italy is technically one of the most developed economies in the world, high income taxes, high unemployment rates for young people, political dysfunction, and widespread corruption/nepotism fuel a general fatalistic lack of motivation for many of Italy’s twenty- and thirty-somethings. People in Italy, for these reasons among others, are considered young for much longer. You’re just a kid in your thirties, of course you’re still figuring out life—after all, two-thirds of Italians 18-35 still live with their parents. While in America, a nation of self-made women and men, you’re expected to have your shit together earlier.
The U.S. prides itself on being a so-called meritocracy. The idea of someone working from rags to riches is much less a part of Italy’s mythos, while in America, we tend to romanticize and even hero-worship such stories as relics of our collective belief in liberty lore. We often feel entitled to these storylines as if we’re all “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In the States, there is a more pervasive feeling of hope, sometimes to a fault. I’ve heard Italians describe Americans as having “a hell of a lot of confidence”, and although success is lucky and scarce, there is still a much greater threshold for it than in Italy—especially when the average income is nearly twice as high in the U.S.
In an open letter to aspiring artists, John Steinbeck once shared advice he had received from a teacher of his own: “I was told, ‘It’s going to take a long time, and you haven’t got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe…Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor.’”
There is such a pervasive belief that hard work and talent will not be employable or appreciated in Italy that a decades-long brain drain has been sapping the country of its young professionals.
For these economic and political reasons, motherhood seems to come with an unrealistic weight in Italy, one that in other countries might be more bearable.
In fact, in Italy, both women's employment and the birth rate are among the lowest in the European Union.
Because many Italian women aren’t having children or are waiting until the very last minute to do so, the government has tried many methods to incentivize them, including a monthly cash bonus ranging from 50 to 175 euros per child, tax breaks of up to €3,000 a year for mothers of two children (soon to be restricted to mothers of three or more), and halving taxes on products like diapers and formula. The average Italian woman has 1 child in her life while in France (to compare a more culturally and economically similar country) the fertility rate is closer to 2.
Besides cutting taxes on baby food, the Italian government has also spent a lot of money on advertisements to encourage women to have children.
An example of said campaigns:
Instead of spending money on ridiculous ads trying to get women to choose to get pregnant it would perhaps be more helpful if Italy decided to adopt more effective government-funded systems to support childcare (like France and their famous crêches).
THEORY TWO: The burden of the myth of the Mamma / The role of the Italian Mother
Beyond pizza, pasta and la dolce vita, one of Italy’s strongest cultural exports is the image of the doting, self-sacrificial mamma—and consequently, the phenomenon of the mammone, 35 year old man-children who shirk independent life in favor of home cooked meals. The mammone is ancient and ubiquitous.
Emperor Nero’s mom helped maneuver him into the line of succession.
Former Prime Minister Berlusconi brought his mom with him on his campaign trail.
Football player Christian Vieri is a self-proclaimed mammone.
It’s a mark of pride for Italians to worship the cult of motherhood (cue Mother Mary). It seems no coincidence Michelangelo’s Pietà is one of the country’s most venerated masterpieces.
Despite putting mothers on a pedestal, or rather because mothers are put on a pedestal, it is difficult for Italian women to choose to become one.
Italian mothers are the oldest in Europe, with the average age of first-time mothers clocking in at 31.1 years old, and the most mothers over 40 than any other industrialised nation.
The influence of the catholic church + current right winged Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni make for a unique situation in Italy. Meloni bemoaned the fact that
many women “cannot fulfill their desire for motherhood without having to give up on professional fulfillment”. But she has also sent complicated signals about women’s roles. Many feminists were dismayed that the premier took her daughter, Ginevra, to the G20 summit in Bali and asked why, while representing Italy on the world stage, Meloni also had to be the primary caregiver and whether the child’s father could not have helped. The prime minister lashed out angrily on Facebook declaring: “I have the right to do all I can for this nation without depriving Ginevra of a mother.”
To be la mamma is to do it all, an impossible role that women already struggling to work in Italy often feel they can't live up to—especially as two full-time incomes become more and more necessary to support a family.
Italian journalist and abortion rights activist Eugenia Maria Roccella refers to the emotional and societal reward:
“Maternity has been largely devalued. If I say, ‘I am a mother’ I have no social reward. If I say, ‘I am a career woman,’ it’s different. There must be social gratification for those who say, ‘I am a mother’.”
Tanturri, a university demographer in Padova, is quoted saying,
“Here, it’s considered that if you become a mother, you lose your life. This is the narrative people see from the older generations.”
According to Francesco Billari, a demographics professor at Milan's Bocconi University, the fact that Italian mothers wait until age 40 to give birth or choose not to become mothers at all does not reflect a waning in Italians' passion for the family, but rather the opposite: "Italians are so well protected by their parents that they stay at home longer, and leaving the house is seen as a sad episode akin to emigration, meaning young people in turn put off having their own children. Too much family eventually means too little."
Unfortunately “Meloni’s government has [only] promoted the traditional family, criticized assisted reproduction like surrogacy for both heterosexual and gay couples, and rejected the idea of offering birthright to immigrants, even to those born of permanent, tax-paying residents.”
IVF in Italy is only legal for heterosexual married couples, excluding members of the LGBTQ community as well as single mothers from “the beauty of being parents” that Meloni so passionately talks about.
Addressing the diminishing birth rate at a conference in Italy, Meloni said:
“I want a country where it’s not scandalous to say we are still born from a man and a woman and where it’s not a taboo to say that maternity is not for sale or that we don’t rent uteruses,” Meloni said…Pope Francis, who also attended the conference, said that a lack of births meant a lack of hope, and hinted at the idea that “acceptance and inclusion” beyond Italian borders could help populate the country.”
“If you think too hard about having kids, you may simply give up,” says Valeria Merlini, a restorer of Renaissance paintings in her late 50s who lives in Rome.
This is one of the very ideas of the novel Breasts and Eggs, a novel written by Japanese author Mieko Kawakami, and interestingly enough, “in terms of the OECD’s so-called old-age dependency ratio, which measures the number of people of working age sustaining those aged 65 and over, only Japan is in a worse position.”
SIDE THEORY: What about plastic?
Could it be that Italian women give birth later because (1) they aren’t as stressed about giving birth before 35 due to cultural norms shaped by the economy etc. and (2) because their food has less plastic?
Arwa Mahdawi says in The Guardian:
“…instead of making women the culprits for infertility, we ought to be shaming the plastics industry. It’s been posited that one reason infertility rates are rising is the fact that we’re all consuming the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of plastic every week.”
It’s obvious that studies show how stress significantly affects pregnancy/fertility. But is it possible stress could be more impactful than age in certain situations?
The art of fertility
Even if a system does provide compensation and protection, there are of course still sacrifices in becoming a mother. To assume that a system can heal or eliminate stress is expecting too much. Stress and pregnancy are inevitably intertwined. Even in the most egalitarian and feminist household or society you still give up your life and body to be a mother. In fact, the process of pregnancy and giving birth is said to give such trauma to the body that it ages you a further 2 years.
The goal is not a system that heals. The goal is that we can live in a society that makes it possible for a woman, when weighing all the options, to decide for herself whether to become a mother or not without losing her place and personhood in society. To make it that the homes and cultures we live in create space for mothers to flourish, which takes work on both a bureaucratic and social level.
While the science of fertility is consistent across cultures, the truth of fertility seems to be more of an art. When and how and why to have a child changes colors and meaning depending on the backdrop of what’s normalized in one’s culture/subculture, life stresses, partner, the meaning of Mother to those in both your close and wide circles, what society takes from you if you become a mother, and what you’re given.
Recommended reading:
Bringing Up Bébé (on motherhood in France vs. motherhood in the U.S. )
Breasts and Eggs (fiction, on the decision to become a mother)
The essay “Family” by Marilynne Robinson (On the institution of family in the U.S.)
I loved this! So insightful and brilliant. Thank you for putting it together!