Abstract: This paper presents a critical analysis of the scientific and popular debate (the one on the journalistic debate is in progress) on the fall in the fertility rate of Italian women in the last two decades, from 1992 to 2012.
The paper wants to denounce the dominant ideology of experts in demography and the family - prisoners without a global view of nationalism and of the anti-scientific position that the social problems derive from the number (in this case low) of people rather than from the social mode of production and its logic and point to the low birth rate of Italian women as one of the biggest contemporary problems.
This work is only a first step towards a change of perspective that considers positively the same phenomenon, recognizing its functionality from the point of view of ecological sustainability, and encouraging the free choice of those who do not have children or want to have less than what the experts prescribe on the basis of an arbitrary target of a "steady population"

Contribution to the 3rd International Degrowth Conference for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity in Venice in 2012.