The greatest challenge facing Europe today is the plunging birthrate that is having a profoundly negative impact on its future. And it is most acute in Malta: At just 1.13 live births per woman, this country has the lowest birthrate in Europe. Excluding Turkey, it also has experienced the highest drop in fertility in the last 10 years. A third of the births in Malta are now to foreigners.
Unfortunately, the implications of our critically low birth rate escape public awareness. One would expect that such a dismal picture would be of concern to local people and the authorities.
This worrying trend in Europe has caught the attention of Italy’s government. Last May, at a symposium in Rome, Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni and Pope Francis forcefully addressed this issue.
Pope Francis strongly deplored the corrosive culture that has led to the calamitous drop in fertility. Only a month before, at a WOOMB international congress, he defended the timeless teachings of the Church on human sexuality. He stated: “We need to discover the beauty of human sexuality by once again turning to the great book of nature, learning to respect the value of the body and the generation of life, with a view to authentic experiences of conjugal love.”
Georgia Meloni said that, for her government, the birth rate and the family are a top priority, stressing that children are the fundamental building blocks for any kind of future for the country
Sadly, we live in a culture that dismisses the true value of sexuality, fertility, and marriage. Young people looking forward to starting a family face considerable financial and social hurdles and burdens. The pope pointed out that the free market economy, unfettered by ethical frameworks, has aggravated the situation whereby embarking on building a family is prohibitively challenging for most young people.
Pope Francis said this is compounded by the great uncertainty the world faces, caused by wars, pandemics, mass immigration and climate change. To counter this, the pope stressed the need for an even greater effort to address this crisis together both on a political and a social level and to promote a culture that wholeheartedly embraces new life.
At the symposium, Meloni addressed the audience with her typical passionate zeal, appealing for the revival of Italy’s moribund birth rate. She said that, for her government, the birth rate and the family are a top priority, stressing that children are the fundamental building blocks for any kind of future for the country.
She said she wants Italians to live in a nation “…in which being a father is not out of fashion and being a mother is not a private choice, but a socially recognised value”. She added that she wanted a nation “…in which it is no longer a scandal to say we are all born from a man and a woman, it is not a taboo to say that maternity is not for sale, that wombs cannot be rented out, that children are not over-the-counter products that you can pick off a shelf as if you were at the supermarket…”.
As Malta faces the onslaught of virulent gender ideology and the irresponsible pursuit of hedonism, one wonders if our political class will rise to reverse our demographic winter?
It is crucial that people of goodwill raise the alarm regarding our sorry situation and incentivise those with responsibility to rally together to address this crisis.