As a longtime fertility doctor, Minas Mastrominas has helped couples in Greece give birth to thousands of bouncing babies, but recently, disturbing trends have escalated at his clinic.
Couples insisting on only one child. Women tearfully renouncing plans to conceive. And a surge in single-child parents asking him to destroy all of their remaining embryos.
“People are saying they can’t afford more than one child, or any at all,” said Mastrominas, a director at Embryogenesis, a large in vitro fertilization center.
“After eight years of economic stagnation, they’re giving up on their dreams,” he said.
Like women in the US and other mature economies, women across Europe have been having fewer children for decades, but demographers are warning of a new hot spot for childlessness on the Mediterranean rim, where Europe’s economic crisis hit hardest.
As couples grapple with a longer-than-expected stretch of low growth, high unemployment, precarious jobs and financial strain, they are increasingly deciding to have just one child — or none.
About one-fifth of women born in the 1970s are likely to remain childless in Greece, Spain and Italy, a level not seen since World War I, according to the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital, based in Vienna.
And hundreds of thousands of fertile young people have left for Germany, the UK and the prosperous north, with little intent of returning unless the economy improves.
Birthrates in the region have slid back almost to where they were before the crisis emerged in 2008.
Women in Spain had been averaging 1.47 children per household, up from 1.24 in 2000, but those gains have all but evaporated.
In Italy, Portugal and Greece, birthrates have reverted to about 1.3. It adds to the growing concern about a demographic disaster in the region.
The current birthrates are well under the 2.1 rate needed to keep a population steady, Eurostat said.
Maria Karaklioumi, 43, a political pollster in Athens, decided to forgo children after concluding she would not be able to offer them the stable future her parents had afforded.
Her sister has a child, and Karaklioumi is painfully aware that her grandmother already had five grandchildren at her age.
Although she has a good job and master’s degree in politics and economics, “there’s too much insecurity,” Karaklioumi said.
Unemployment among women is 27 percent, compared with 20 percent for men.
“I don’t know if I’ll have this job in two months or a year,” Karaklioumi said. “If you don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, how can you plan for the future?”
Whether the demographic decline slows ultimately depends on the financial fortunes in the south, where most countries suffered double-dip recessions. Without significant improvement, the region is trending toward some of the lowest birthrates in the world, which will accelerate stress on pension and welfare systems and crimp growth as a shrinking workforce competes with the rest of Europe and the world.
The lower birthrates have been aggravated by fiscal pressures that constrained countries from offering robust family support programs.
Whereas France offers a monthly family benefit of 130 euros (US$138) per child after the second child, Greece provides just 40 euros.
Countries have recognized the problem and recently snapped into action. Spain appointed a “sex czar” in February to forge a national fertility action plan and address population declines in rural areas. Italy increased bonuses for having babies and backed labor laws granting more flexible parental leave. Greece, as the weakest economic link, does not have the same options.
Struggling to manage a recovery after nearly eight years of recession, the government cannot make the fertility drop a top priority.
Child tax breaks and subsidies for large families were weakened under Greece’s austerity-linked international financial bailouts.
State-financed child care became means-tested and is hard to get for women seeking work. Greece now has the lowest budget in the EU for family and child benefits.
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