A roundup of unorthodox interventions, full of intelligence and critical sense, an essential vademecum for anyone interested in the topic. A discussion that provides us with excellent tools to “stop thinking that demographic winter is a moral or economic issue: it is, instead, a question of perspective, which imposes new lenses; it is a question of political geography and reorganization of the world according to new criteria.”

Demographic winter: and before us lie barren, frozen plains to put The Iron Throne to shame, echoes of Shakespearean tragedies resound in the mind. No more children are being made in Italy, where will our civilization go, but most importantly: who will pay our pensions? But what is the point of insisting that the only way to keep the system going is to procreate, even where women – to be precise, a minority of women quantified by ISTAT as 5 percent – despite being in a position to have children, do not want them? With respect to the issue of motherhood, schematisms often win out and women find themselves represented either as victims of a country in which having children is a privilege – the precariousness of work, low wages, inaccessible kindergartens, the welfare state that does not provide as it should – or as a handful of cynical, superficial, careerists and future repentants destined for a lonely old age embittered by the regret of not having reproduced. Between these two poles are the real people, to whom the interventions collected in this book give voice. Many women, but also some men, who have taken up the challenge launched by Simonetta Sciandivasci with lucidity and irony on the pages of the “Mirror,” a cultural insert of the “Stampa,” a challenge to question why one becomes a parent or not, to reason about the different possible physiognomies of a family. There are those who advocate procreative agnosticism, because becoming a parent is something so intimate and personal as to make principled positions impossible; those who insist on the need to make adoption easier for single parents; those who blame the weight of past conditioning; and those who try to argue the case for unconsciousness. There are those who consider egg freezing before embarking on a path of transition from woman to man, those who argue that fathers are quite happy not to have parental equality, and those who lament the omnipotence of mothers in the event of separation. There are women who demand more respect for choosing not to be mothers, men who try to dismantle the narcissisms, frailties, and contradictions of being a father. And then there are dowries waiting patiently in trunks, grandmothers and mothers waiting for grandchildren from daughters who carelessly cross the threshold of thirty-five… A roundup of unorthodox interventions, full of intelligence and critical sense, an essential vademecum for anyone interested in the subject. A debate that provides us with excellent tools to “stop thinking that the demographic winter is a moral or economic issue: it is, instead, a question of perspective, which imposes new lenses; it is a question of political geography and reorganization of the world according to new criteria.”