Fall maternity photos in milan italy

If having a child was not enough, parents of newborns living in hamlets of the mountains that comprise the Italian Val d’Ultimo have an additional cost.

In a rebirth of the myth of white storks giving birth to babies, wooden carved baby storks in a sling are a frequent element of the exteriors of houses in valleys.

The father’s friends escort them and remain there until he decides to buy the round of drinks.

“There has been a noticeable increase in storks and other symbols of birth being put outside someone’s house, especially in recent years,” Stefan Schwarz, who is the city’s mayor, said. Ultimo, where there are nearly 3,000 people spread across three hamlets.

Ultimo is home to about 40 babies each year, Schwarz added. “We’ll be needing more nurseries and will perhaps have to make the schools bigger,” Schwarz said. This is a problem that mayors from other Italian towns ponder with jealousy.

From the “baby boom” years of the 1960s, the birth rate in Europe’s fourth largest economy has dropped in half. The decline picked up speed in 2010 before the year before COVID-19 struck, adding to record-setting numbers for births and deaths.

In 2020, there were 404,104 children in Italy, which was down by nearly 16,000 compared to 2019. This was the lowest rate of births that has been recorded since the Italian Union in 1861. However, the gap between deaths and births (there were seventy-seven deaths) was the highest it had ever been prior to the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918.

Istat, The national statistics agency, claimed the drop in population of 384,000 was similar to an entire city of the size of Florence being removed from the map. It’s quite a drastic shift for Italy as it has changed from a country that is known as having large family sizes to one of the countries with the lowest fertility rates in the EU.

But the population differs greatly between the 20 regions in the country and between provinces as well as towns within these.

While the rest of Italy struggles with the massive drop in birthrates, Val d’Ultimo, along with its larger province of Bolzano within the semi-autonomous Alto Adige region, is slightly different from the rest of Italy.

In 2019, Bolzano was the only region of Italy that recorded more births than deaths; despite the fact that the province had a higher number of deaths compared to deliveries in 2018 as a result of the COVID-19 virus, it registered the highest amount of deliveries across the country in the country, with 9.6 babies born for every 1,000 women.

Please take a look at Sardinia, where they had the lowest rate of births in Italy, with 5.1 babies per 1000 women. On average, the females of Bolzano had 1.7 babies in 2019, compared to an average national rate of 1.27 and just one in Sardinia.

As Schwarz contemplates how to handle the new additions to his city, Debora Porra, the mayor of Villamassargia, a town that has similar population numbers in the south-western part of Sardinia that has one of the highest fertility rates across the nation, fights to keep the sole birthing center in the region in operation.

The facility is located in the hospital in Sulcis-Iglesiente. It is able to serve Villamassagia and Carbonia, which is the other major town in the province that has 120,000 inhabitants. In Italy, it is required to have at least 500 births in a maternity unit per year to ensure that funds are sustained.

“This year, we managed to get the closure of the maternity unit postponed, even though we only had 300 births last year,” Porra added. Porra. “But others have closed in other towns, and we’ll be next.”

Additionally, women living in the province don’t have access to pain-free delivery. The lack of epidural pain relief isn’t commonplace in Sardinia and other parts of Italy.

“The hospitals in our area have never had analgesia services, so women are forced to either give birth in pain or travel to Cagliari [Sardinia’s capital],” said Porra. “I’m absolutely exhausted trying to fight these battles.”

It’s easy to conclude that Bolzano’s rise in births is due to the money. It is, after all, in the wealthy, Italian-German-speaking Alto Adige and regularly ranks in surveys as the best place to live in Italy.

Schwarz suggested that the main reason for the increased reproduction at Val d’Ultimo is because “the winters are long.” Others agree with Schwarz, adding that “our TVs don’t work.”

However, there is more in play. One of the primary reasons has been a complete political plan, which started in 2005, with large financial aid for families that range from child allowances to monthly payments and assistance in buying homes and also coincided with the creation of support services like nurseries.

“Back then, we didn’t really have a policy for families; it wasn’t a theme,” said Waltraud Deeg, the vice president of Bolzano province and family counselor.

I am confident enough to start the process of creating a family right now. My acquaintances are thinking of having children also, but everything depends on the stability of my work and how I perform.

“Now we have a highly active policy. It was important to not think only about the city of Bolzano as well as the rural areas as well, and to provide services available for children in the early years.”

In the early 2000s th, the Alto Adige region, which is situated near the Austrian border, was among the first regions in Italy to implement the concept known as Tagesmutter or “mother for the day,” an idea for childcare that was developed within northern Europe and required a woman to transform her home into the nursery and caring for five or more children per day, ranging from three months and three years old.

Following two years of learning, Sonja Spitaler set up as a Tagesmutter for the town of Laives in Laives, a town located on the outskirts of Bolzano City, in 2006.

“At the time, this wasn’t exactly my dream job,” Spitaler said. Spitaler. “I additionally have three kids, which made it the most practical job for me. I needed some freedom in order to generate my own money.”