50 years after Fallaci’s masterpiece, we live in a company destined to remain without heirs. Who might have children does not want to do it. And immigration will not reverse the trend.
Fifty years ago, in 1975, Oriana Fallaci published her letter to an never -born child, who had since the title an extraordinary success. The epistolary book addressed the themes of abortion, the female condition, the elusive paternity and the uncertainty of bringing the world in a difficult child in a difficult time; You don’t know, Fallaci wrote, if you give it or aborts you do it wrong or a gift. Now has passed half a century and Italy has gone from one of the most prolific countries in Europe to what has been doing less children: for years the dead have overcome the births and, as Istat attests, the over -thectnists have now exceeded children under ten years. So fifty years after that letter, the children never born have become a people, and they are the majority invisible compared to the children already born.
To leave them in the limbo of the incidents, mass contraception, the use of condoms, and then the abortions, the diffusion of sterile couples thoughtalternatives, homosexuals, or consisting of elderly, no longer fertile women. But most of everything has thought about the refusal of the will of the children, the rejection of paternity and motherhood, and the widespread motivation that today is increasingly difficult to give the world, in this world, a child. Psychologically understandable motivation if we consider the spread of subjective fragility, the precariousness of relationships, the working commitment of both parents; But objectively not very well founded if we make a comparison between the flourishing birth rate of other eras, in decidedly more difficult conditions than today.
He daughter in poor society, he had daughter in war time, sometimes with fathers at the frontshe was the daughter in numerous families, single -income and in small, inadequate, overcrowded houses, sometimes in studios. Poor societies, it also happens now, daughter and daughter of more than wealthy ones, where the claims of life are greater. Let’s stop feeling on the verge of a catastrophe, convinced of living in the worst of possible worlds; Each era has its crosses and delights, the problems have simply changed, they are of a different type than those of our parents and our predecessors. In reality, our mental conditions have changed, we are definitely more fragile and more demanding. We are no longer used to renunciations, sacrifices, we want to live our life, prolong your youth, we feel permanent children. Then, for heaven’s sake, it is certainly true that there has never been a forward -looking policy of supporting the family and procreation, except, unless insufficient incentives, in the absence of solid structures and social concessions. But we now all know these themes. We then leave the sociology of the ailments aside and instead enter on a much more delicate ground, which concerns our relationship with life, with the world, with others.
Let’s start with a general observation: how much does that people of children never born on the future of our country weighs? Destinue it to anger? Can the “replacement” of that people of children have never been born with the arrival of migratory flows, with adoptions, the trafficking of artificial pregnancies and for rent, or more brutally with the substitute of humanoids, automotive and robots, led by artificial intelligence? Do you satisfy us or consoles this perspective? Or to put it better, on the contrary, we have nothing to object to this situation, we have no desire to react to this scenario that is looming, we do not want to try different solutions, try to change course, reverse the demographic and family tendency, to encourage birthday and protect fertility? Should we necessarily adopt a new fatalism and accept everything as irreparable and irreversible, a resignation that damn the old fatalism that we condemned in archaic and religious societies? Is it fatal that no children are born, it is fatal that the children go to live far from their native places and their families of origin, is it fatal that the limbo of the children never born is more populated than the cradles in the obstetrics departments?
But the speech becomes even more touching when it concerns our intimate, personal, life sphere. We see around us families once numerous who are gradually thinning and who in a generation or two are destined to extinguish themselves. The few children born in recent decades do not in turn put other children to the world and often go away, far away. We really live, from a demographic point of view, a society without heirs, as I had denounced last year in a literary essay. In this light, the presence of grandparents without grandchildren is increasingly frequent: they have, we have, now the age to have children from our children but for a series of factors first mentioned and easily understandable, we do not have grandchildren on whom to project our life expectancy, to which to dedicate our attention, in which to sublimate our decline and live the path towards the conclusion without even the only form of earthly immortality that we could always define, that we could define. Transmortality, or the spare part, the passage of witness, the replacement of grandparents with the grandchildren. And to many of us who also had children, it is so desire to update Fallaci’s letter, directing it to the never -born nephew. We have lost memories of affections, we do not have hopes for nascent affections. Nobody’s grandparents.
