Tiny Steps Forward

Francesca Peverelli, a 31-year-old architect in Milan, has finally realized the family she’d sketched out years earlier on her mental drawing board. First there was Pietro, born two years ago to Peverelli and her husband, also an architect. Then on May 5, Fratello Francesco arrived — like his brother — right on time. With both children down for a nap, Peverelli recalled her plans. “It was already decided,” she said by telephone. “We’d always had the idea to have two and to have them close together in age, both for them and for us.”

The Peverelli family also offers just the kind of tidy picture that many Italian political and business leaders have been hoping to see multiply for the past decade. With a birthrate that has been stuck at or near the bottom of the charts, economists have warned that Italy was heading for a demographic disaster of employee shortages and retiree overloads. But Pietro and Francesco may be part of the first blip of a bambino revival, according to Italy’s national statistics institute. The birthrate rose .3% in 2001 over the previous year, the second straight annual rise after seven years of negative or flat numbers. The 2001 median was 1.25 children per woman, up from 1.18 in 1996 when Italian women were the least reproductive in the world. A noteworthy jump in new children of foreign-born mothers is due largely to rising immigration, but there is also an increase in the overall birthrate throughout the economically more advanced north — evidence perhaps that Italian parental pangs may again be in vogue. Milan led the trend two years ago with its highest birthrate since the early 1980s. Peverelli, who has cut back her hours significantly since Pietro was born, says her professional ambitions must share space with other aspirations. “I wanted to be able to have both [children and career]. Of course it’s not so simple. But not having children wasn’t an option.”

Not every mother can put her happy parental plans into action — at least not without some help. While several regional administrations have introduced financial incentives to encourage families to have babies, the national government is standing between some potential mammas and papas and their would-be children. The lower house of Parliament approved an assisted-fertility bill in June that critics are calling the most rigid of its kind in Europe. If approved by the Senate in September, the law would forbid the use of donor sperm or eggs, ban the freezing of embryos, deny any kind of fertility assistance to single and gay potential parents and virtually exclude fertility techniques from national health-care coverage. Health Minister Girolamo Sirchia, who praised the proposal for ending decades of unregulated assisted-fertility practices, said that government funding would be minimal because “sterility is not an illness.”

After struggling with a fertility problem for several years, Giuliano Milani says that Sirchia — and the coalition of mostly Catholic politicians from both the government and the opposition who support the measure — have it all wrong. “Having lived the condition of a sterile couple, it is just like having an illness and therefore must be treated as such. There is part of your body that doesn’t respond. It is a sickness, not an ethical problem.” Milani, whose son was born in Bologna 14 months ago through in vitro fertilization, said one of the most distressing aspects of the current proposal is the ban on freezing embryos, a prohibition that currently exists only in Germany among European countries. Freezing embryos, he says, is vital to allow women to conceive without the unnecessary damage to their health that occurs when the hormones are repeatedly stimulated to produce eggs. Milani predicted “a mass rush to Switzerland and other countries” if the Senate approves the bill.

Ahead of the expected bruising Senate battle, women’s and parents’ rights groups are mobilizing against the proposal, a campaign kicked off in early July when 5,000 people marched on Rome in a colorful but fervent protest. One of the organizers, Monica Soldano of Rome’s Madre Provetta assisted-fertility center, noted that the bill also calls on the state to decide what to do with 24,000 existing frozen embryos. “The government becomes the absolute master of the embryo,” she said. Supporters of the proposal say it would finally set down rules after a half-century of unregulated private and public fertility-assistance programs. Pier Ferdinando Casini, speaker of the lower house, said Parliament had “the courage to make a law that can overcome the current ‘Wild West’ situation.” But for some would-be parents, no sheriff would be better than this one.