A court in Florence is reported to have petitioned Italy's supreme Constitutional Court to rule on Italy's 2003 law on assisted fertility, one of the most restrictive in Europe.

The bill was passed by a bipartisan alliance of Catholics in a battle which also pitted male MPs again female MPs.

At the time, liberal parliamentarians and most female lawmakers accused Catholic politicians of bowing to the Church by adopting a highly restrictive bill which they said placed women's health at risk and would deny sterile couples many of the options that are standard treatment in other European countries.

Supporters of the bill said it respected the rights of the human embryo, preserved the family as the fundamental social unit and ended decades of unregulated practices which have led to notorious cases of 'granny births'.

Under the 2003 law, single parents, same-sex couples and women beyond child-bearing age are banned from using assisted fertility techniques, which is now limited to sterile heterosexual couples who are married or live together.

The law bans the use of donor sperm or eggs and forbids embryos from being frozen or used for scientific research. ...

The law slaps down heavy fines for doctors and patients caught breaking the law. Doctors caught using donated sperms or eggs face fines of up to 600,000 euros and those found treating same-sex couples or singles can be fined up to 400,000 euros.

Labels: donor conception, Italy

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With more than one in five Japanese 65 or older, the government is encouraging citizens like Tsuneko Hariki of Kamikatsu to work well past traditional retirement age.

In Kamikatsu, on the Japanese island of Shikoku, officials have set up an agricultural cooperative whose members log on to computers daily to check the fluctuating prices of the produce that they grow. Then they go out and pick whatever is fetching the best price that day. Unusual, yes, but what’s truly surprising about this cooperative is the average age of its members: 70. In a country where lots of folks retire at 60, Kamikatsu’s residents are working well into their senior years—and they’re doing so not only to buoy retirement earnings but also to energize the local economy. With nearly half of the town’s residents 65 and older, the government realized that there simply wasn’t enough of a traditional workforce available to build or staff most typical industries.

Kamikatsu shows in microcosm what Japan and several other nations now face--and what others soon will. For decades, demographers and economists have watched the world’s fertility rate plunge as countries grew wealthier and more urban. These days, fertility rates in much of the industrialized world are far below replacement levels--that is, the number of kids that parents must have to replace themselves and adults who remain childless. Though the steepest declines happened first in wealthy countries like Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain, even many developing countries have seen their fertility rates head downward. ...

Seeking solutions, a few policy experts have begun looking more closely at the United States. After a big drop in the mid-1970s, America’s fertility rate bounced back and has remained relatively stable, near replacement level--a 30-year-plus pattern that astounds European observers. For a time, demographers explained the difference between the U.S. and other industrialized countries by observing that America’s population was more diverse, with more recent immigrants who had more children. But fertility levels among native-born white Americans also remain higher than among native-born Europeans, and the U.S.’s overall fertility outpaces that of other countries with a high percentage of foreign-born residents.

Demographers have also speculated that the higher fertility rate is a function of America’s being a more religious country, reasoning that those who engage in organized religious activity favor larger families. One survey found 46 percent of Americans attending religious services regularly, compared with just 4 percent of Japanese, 7 percent of Swedes, and 16 percent of Germans. Yet fertility rates have remained stable in the U.S. even as they have plummeted in religious fundamentalist countries like Iran and Jordan, as well as in developing countries like Mexico, where rates of religious attendance remain higher than in America.

Faced with these contradictions, some scholars are now positing the distinctive nature of the U.S. economy and its labor market as a principal reason why Americans are having so many kids. “In general, women (and couples) are deterred from having children when the economic cost--in the form of lower lifetime wages--is too high,” wrote economists Francesco Billari, José Antonio Ortega, and Hans-Peter Kohler in a 2006 study. “Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then reenter the labor force.”

Labels: demographics, economics, Europe, Italy, Japan, natalism

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So, the truth of Veronica Lario's marriage to Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, is finally coming out. "I cannot be his babysitter," she writes in her book, Tendenza Veronica, published last week. But the surprise is not that the usually private and silent Veronica is now very publicly complaining about her husband, but more importantly: what took her so long?

For 19 years, Veronica Lario not only tolerated her spouse's wayward behaviour – alleged hair transplants, affairs – but concealed it from the world. Then, in April, she snapped. Her husband was photographed with an 18-year-old model at a party; Veronica thought he was on business in Naples. "It was the latest lie. Better, then, to try to seek a last way to respect myself, better to divorce," Veronica said. "I'm done."

What changed? "He broke the open rules," says Maria Princeton, 51, a businesswoman. "She knew he had an independent private life, knew he had affairs, but what he is doing is dissing her and dissing the kids, and that is out of bounds." ...

"Everybody assumes in those [Mediterranean] cultures that a prominent man will have one if not two mistresses," says Maria, who is half Italian and herself the daughter of a high-profile philandering father and a devout mother (who put up and shut up). "In fact, in Spain, you don't have as much status if you're not into that." But the controlling force behind it all is the family. "The Italians understand that it is not good for children or for the wife to divorce, because divorce means there will be another family."

"Veronica Lario kept her mouth shut for years because of her family," echoes Accettura. (Berlusconi has two children from his first wife; three children from Veronica.) "She did her best to protect her three children, because how do you divide the assets when there are five children?"

But what of the emotional cost? Does living separate lives really work? The actress Tilda Swinton certainly thinks so. She lives with John Byrne, the artist and writer and father of her two children, but also turned up at the Baftas last year with her boyfriend, Sandro Kopp.

"It's really, really straightforward," she has said. "Very, very often, people have children with people they are no longer sweethearts with… and then they have a relationship with someone new, right? What rarely happens is that they are still completely good friends and continue to live in the same house. But that's all it is." She said they would never separate. "We have a really lovely life bringing up the children together."

Labels: Europe, Italy, Marriage, open relationships

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