Among the open questions everybody wonders about the trend's main features of the third millennium there's one investing us the most: which will it be the destiny of Italy at the light of the sole record it holds, the country with the lowest birthrate world wide? Showing an average of 1.16 children per women, the autochthonous population is destined to behalf over seventy years, getting us back to the eighteen-century level. The reliable conjecture is that, towards 2070, Italy's inhabitants will be ethnically half Italians and half Maghrebi, Slavonic, Albanians, Philippines, South Americans, Senegalese, who, among others, are awfully more prolific.  
In human history, the cases of this kind of replacement, due to the combination of the gradual decay of a population and huge migration events surely don't lack. It's enough the weariness of a population, its lack of response, in other words the exhaustion of his propulsive thrust, a little as it happened to the ancient Greeks who had been for some centuries the main precursors of civilisation and then almost disappeared from the fore. 

Let's try to list the causes of the event: 

Decrease of the Church's influence  
When Italy was a Catholic country, really Catholic, the teachings of the Church influenced morals and families with five, six and even ten children were quite common. Birth control was deemed, by the sizeable part of population, against nature, even with the Ogino-Knaus system, the Catholic doctrine admitted at a certain moment. Getting the influence of Church ever more lessened, or having the Church conformed itself to times, families with more than three children has become an exception.  It's unlikely, even not impossible, that this situation can change in the next future.  

The spreading of contraceptives  
A generation ago there were only condoms and furthermore a lot of people had a little reserve to buy them in pharmacies and also they did not work well anytime. Then contraceptive pills came: to the first contraceptive pill, having revolutionised morals, several contraceptive means have added. It is obvious that by the pharmacological point of view, the situation is destined for further bettering and the probable reduction in applying this means will be due only to a change in morals. 

Abortion legalisation  
The attempts carried out by the Italian Catholics to change in a restrictive direction the legislation about abortion are becoming more intensive and frequent, and it is not excluded that, helped by the climate of apprehension getting spreader about the birthrate decrease, they can achieve some success. Nowadays it has been calculated a legal abortion out of 3-4 births, so it's evident that more strict rules could help the number of births rising, welcome or not by the mother. But in Italy the rules going “against the general trend “ are usually bypassed. So a tightening in abortion legislation could only have the effect to increase the number of illegal abortions, or for the well-off classes, those made abroad.  

Women freeing and their massive entry in the labour market 
Luckily we do not live any more in the period when the slogan “ womb is mine and I manage it “ was in use, but the evolution of woman condition influences deeply on birth rate fall. First of all, the conquer of parity within marriage makes women have children only by the time and at the extent they want, and they do not accept anymore, as regard to this matter, husbands' requirements (and even less those of a partner). Second rate, women have developed career requirements that on a side push them to postpone naturally the motherhood moment, and on the other side they must undergo heavy conditioning, since many enterprises grant reluctantly the corresponding benefits and trend anyhow to disadvantage who absent too often to care children.  About this point, nevertheless, it can be reasonably expected a reverse of trend, like we have already recorded in other western countries (leading Scandinavian ones) having preceded Italy along the women emancipation path.  

Transformation of economy from agricultural into industrial  
It's already a common place: within an agricultural economy, sons represented economic riches, while in an industrial economy, or even post-industrial, they are a load. Therefore the birthrate is strictly related to the parents' work. This is one of the reasons why in the Third world birthrte keeps on being higher than ours. However in Italy the effect of this metamorphosis must be already exhausted, meaning that the pass from a sector to another has been completed. 

Urbanisation 
This subject is parallel to the previous one: raising children in town is more difficult, more expensive and also more demanding than raising them in country. Nevertheless, the coming into town that has featured the post-war seems over. In fact, since some time we are recording the reverse phenomenon, an escape from metropolis toward surrounding places, less crowded and more liveable, where bringing up a family is easier. If the selected places will be able to fit themselves and timely of proper structures, this “return to country“ could become a not marginal demographic incentive. 

More advanced age marriages  
These are the unavoidable consequence of a run of factors: the extension of the school attendance, the delays in entering the labour market for youths, promiscuity allowing satisfying one's own desires even out of marriage, the will to experience more before committing oneself definitively, and many others. More advanced age marriages could also be, according to sociologists, a transitory phenomenon as after the revolution in morals of the seventieths, eighties and nineties, society finds a new order. 

Spreading of pairs of fact 
It's another aspect of social evolution wherein Italy is still behindhand with respect to other countries. If in our country birthrate has been affected the most it's for in many environments, especially in province and mainly in the South, children born out of the marriage are not yet full accepted and legislation do not protect them in a proper way.  

Hedonism ethos  
By the point of view of many sociologists, this is the main cause for Italians youth and especially middle class Italian youth, do not give birth anymore to children: they do not want to make the sacrifices required to, they prefer to invest their own savings in travels or cars, they've already too much requirements to accept the restrictions a family, specially if large, involve. The consumer society, with all the new temptations it offers in comparison with the previous generations, stresses this trend. It could concern a cyclical phenomenon related to the current phase of a new common welfare and so transitory.  

Lack of support structure.  
Even if sometimes the Italian State responsibility is exaggerated, this time it really has serious responsibilities.  
Since many of the above mentioned phenomena were unavoidable as well as foreseeable, governments succeeding in the last twenty years must have contrasted them supplying crèches, easy terms houses for new families and what else having proved its efficacy in the rest of Europe.  
Probably, it would have not be useful to modify the general trend, but surely it would have softened it, maybe taking away an excuse to young pairs.  

Lack of fiscal policies in favour of the family  
See above. Nobody wants to get back to the tax over singles of Mussolini's memory, but tax breaks for sons, notwithstanding the early touching-ups are almost a send-up. This matter the example of France, that first underwent the demographic fall but knew how to reverse the trend, could help. 

Young unemployment and extended dependence from parents  
We are facing what maybe is the most worrying problem at the moment, certainly decisive in reducing the birthrate.  
Even if the decrease in births affects also the young employed (and in certain cases even more), the unemployment and the following financial dependence upon parents is often an obstacle for whom really wants to have children.  

In the light of these considerations, the situation look serious, but not desperate.  
A return to normal birthrates will not eliminate surely the pressure of the underprivileged over our country limits, but must help in contenting it, outlooking as less pressing the labour demand, less urgent the replacement of foreign young in a population that is getting older fast.