Empty cradles: reproductive health as a public health priority
Shifting the focus from the mere management of established infertility to early prevention – starting with information provided in schools – and on to fertility preservation: the Manifesto of the Italian Fertility Association
Key points
With 370,000 births in 2024 and a demographic curve creaking under the weight of what has now become a chronic demographic winter, Italia can no longer afford to treat fertility as a private matter. The Italian Fertility Association (AIFe) launched the Fertility 2030 Manifesto at Montecitorio during its first National Congress: a proposal to permanently integrate reproductive health into public health policies.
The Manifesto sets out a comprehensive strategy that finally brings together prevention, early diagnosis, the preservation of reproductive potential and welfare policies. The starting point is a fact that has now become structural: in 2024, of the approximately 370,000 children born in Italia, 17,660 were conceived through medically assisted reproduction, accounting for 4.8 per cent of the total – almost one in twenty.
“We must shift our focus from merely managing established infertility to the early protection of reproductive health,” says Laura Rienzi, President of AIFe. “Fertility must become a permanent feature of public policy. Providing information at an early stage, identifying risk factors promptly and reducing delays in accessing treatment means offering people greater choice and enabling reproductive medicine to provide more timely and appropriate responses, without presenting it as the only solution to the falling birth rate.”
1 in 20 children conceived through IVF
During the Congress, the Association provided a preview of some of the findings from the Annual Report to Parliament on the state of implementation of Law 40. In 2024, 115,455 IVF cycles were carried out, with a cumulative pregnancy rate of 34 per cent.
“Almost one in twenty children is now born thanks to assisted reproductive technology (ART): this is no longer a niche phenomenon, but a structural component of Italy’s birth rate,” emphasises Maurizio Guido, Head of the National ART Register at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. “The data becomes particularly valuable when used to improve healthcare planning. The challenge is to understand how and when people seek treatment, to facilitate timely diagnosis and care, and to reduce the regional disparities that still affect access to treatment.”
