FERTILITY DAY: 6 REASONS WHY IT'S A WRONG (AND UNFAIR) CAMPAIGN

The Italian government, and the Minister of Health Beatrice Lorenzin, have promoted a campaign, complete with advertising images and an official website, to launch Fertility Day, the day of fertility set for next 22 September. The images of the launch of the advertising campaign, which you see below, have however sparked, especially on social networks, an avalanche of controversy, so much so that the site dedicated to the initiative, www.fertilityday2016.it, is closed.

Why is Fertility Day the wrong campaign?

The day was promoted above all because Italy is a country with zero growth, the population is aging and fewer children are being born. An alarming prospect, which actually concerns many Western countries, but which in Italy has led to the campaign of controversy, criticized by many parties, especially by the women concerned. We at alfemminile too agree, the Fertility Day campaign is wrong, and above all it tends to discriminate against certain types of people, making it an even unfair initiative. Below we explain why , commenting on the images released one by one.

1. Promotes fertility but does not support mothers

This image of the Fertility Day campaign invites all women to hurry up to have children, because fertility is at maturity, and depends on age. a limited time, that is, as long as she remains young and fertile. At the same time, however, in Italy there is little support for families and especially for working mothers: few public nurseries or nurseries accessible to any mother (often the prices are too high, and many new mothers do not return to work, preferring to stay at home to raise their children alone). And what about the poor safeguards for women looking for work, often forced to sign blank resignations?

2. Invites the young people to have children but does not help them find work

The campaign, which is intended to be ironic, invites young people to be "creative", that is, to procreate. It seems that no other form of creativity is allowed, and that young people are expected to have nothing more than to have children. This is also demonstrated by the scarce initiatives to limit and solve the problem of youth unemployment, the real reason why young couples do not start a family. How to feed a child if you are not working? With "creativity"?

3. Blame women

This postcard you see above is one of the most passive aggressive: it deliberately blames women by trying to explain to them how much an only child would suffer, perhaps even very late. Deciding to have children late, perhaps at 40, leads to an only child with parents who are not very young, without a playmate (a little brother, a little sister). Blame? Of the mother, according to the government, who decided late to find a stable and non-blackmail job, to find the right partner (or should we have children with the first fertile man who passes by?) And to marry him.

4. Discriminates non-traditional families

The Constitution calls for conscious and responsible procreation. An invitation to live motherhood and fatherhood responsibly. A fair invitation, of course, but by placing the emphasis on procreation, and not on being a mother and father, only couples who naturally conceive a child are taken into account, effectively discriminating families born thanks to "adoption, artificial fertilization," or homogenitorial families, made up of same-sex partners, which, however, cannot be adopted by law in Italy, not to mention that adoptions and artificial insemination in Italy are obstacles for heterosexual couples as well.

5. Discriminates infertile women who cannot get pregnant

In this image, perhaps we want to mention the classic grandmother, or the old aunt, who at family celebrations takes her newly married young niece aside, and kindly invites her to get a move on and have a child.But if it becomes a public campaign, this phrase becomes slightly terrorist, and what is more serious, it discriminates against infertile women, who cannot get pregnant and who suffer a lot from it.

6. Ignore women's freedom of choice

"Fertility is a common good", like water, the countryside seems to say in this image. No less wrong than the other images, this one strikes in the heart the rights of women so hard won, above all the freedom of choice to do or not having children, how and when to have them, and so on. If fertility is a common good, and not a simple physical and physiological state of men and women, a government, like the fascist one of the past, can feel authorized in times of crisis to ask women to have more children, whether they want them or not, whether they have the financial means to raise them or not. Also in this image, the woman is not seen as a subject free to make her own choices, but as a simple producer of children, useful only as long as it is capable of making them.