“I gave up on a part of my happiness because I was afraid of falling into depression again.”

“Without family nearby, the slightest setback can bring down a logistical operation that depends on everything fitting together perfectly.”

“My parents became ill. I had to look after them.”

There is no shortage of heated debate over Italy’s falling birth rate. Nor of government bonuses aimed at encouraging people to have more children. And then there is this figure: 400,000 - the number of children Italian women say they would have liked to have in 2025. Children they wanted, dreamed of, imagined: a first child, or a third. Children they never had.

Francesca Bubba, a writer, activist and public communicator, decided to join the debate by asking a question that few people seem to be asking: Why?

Reading the responses, she says, “you eventually start to recognize your own handwriting in everyone else’s.” To understand what lies behind the numbers, she argues, “you have to tell the story of the journey: how does a woman go from maybe someday to never?”

In just four days, 10,364 women responded to her survey. Sixty percent hold a university degree, nine in ten are in a stable relationship, and 63% have permanent jobs. As Bubba points out, “if the system breaks down even for these women, imagine what happens where the basic conditions aren’t even in place.”

The main reason behind these empty cradles is the one you might expect: the cost of raising a child. But the activist went a step further, grouping the responses into broader categories. And that is where the picture changes dramatically.

Two out of three women mentioned the burden of caregiving, an unequal division of responsibilities at home, or the lack of a support network. Three out of five pointed to health problems. Financial concerns, by comparison, were cited by only one in two.

“Perhaps a decade of policies aimed at increasing the birth rate has been built around the wrong factor. There is no bank transfer that can get up at three in the morning or remember when a child is due for a vaccination.”

And when the survey asks women to describe, in their own words, why they decided not to have another child, money disappears from the picture entirely.

“There are sleepless nights, fevers, exhausted bodies, days spent without even 30 seconds to think without being interrupted.”

Then comes the “cruelest” question: If you could change just one thing, what would have made that child possible?

A higher salary was chosen by 21% of respondents. But the two answers relating to a partner who would share half the workload and mandatory paternity leave together accounted for 26.8%.

Only one father in 71 remembers to buy his children’s shoes.

“That means it is the mother who notices when the child’s feet have grown. She is the one who finds two hours before dinner to go and buy them.”

Bubba looked at eight different household tasks. Among women who were solely responsible for three or fewer of them, 44% had given up on having another child. The responsibilities that are most evenly shared are the evening ones, when the child is physically there and visible. The mental load, by contrast, remains almost entirely the woman’s.

“According to this sample, there is a measurable relationship between who remembers the pediatrician appointments and the number of children who are born,” she says.

In the stories of women who can pinpoint the exact moment when they decided not to have another child, the body is often at the center of the story.

“For four years, I never slept through the night.”

“The day after I came home from the hospital. I was alone, holding the baby, physically and psychologically exhausted, and I thought: What am I supposed to do now?”

Then there are the demands of caring for others, financial insecurity, the absence of a secure job, or not having a stable partner - all things that sometimes arrive only “when it is too late.”

The word that appears most often is “grief.”

But there is also an overwhelming sense of guilt:

“I feel like a failure.”

“Empty. Half a woman.”

Those who share this frustration often feel ashamed of admitting it.

The person responsible for that absence, Bubba explains, “is the one they see reflected in the mirror.”

Yet when the questionnaire asks women to direct a message to those in government, the tone changes completely: “Imperatives, explicit accusations, meticulous expertise.”

If the activist were given the chance to address Parliament, she says she would bring three statements.

The first: “One woman says she realized she was alone even though she was in a relationship.”

The second is the story of a woman who says that “if she closes her eyes, she can still see the blurred image of a child walking away — a child she will never be able to hold again.”

The third contains the question the country has never asked itself: a woman speaks of a pain that no one recognizes and for which no one does anything.

Because there is nothing more political than the message these women are sending when their individual pain becomes a collective one: the children we want but cannot have are the failure of an entire system.

“My request,” Bubba concludes, “is for a period of parental leave reserved for fathers, mandatory, non-transferable, and equal in length [to maternity leave]. They identified it themselves - twice, in separate parts of the questionnaire, and without anything in the questions prompting the answer. It seems to me like a starting point that could bring us closer to a situation where we no longer have to accept saying goodbye to the blurred images of the children we never had.”

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