[For] the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country's population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: "lowest-low fertility."

[The] main threats to Europe are economic. Alongside birthrate, the other operative factor in the economic equation is lifespan. People everywhere are living longer than ever, and lifespan is continuing to increase beyond what was once considered a natural limit. Policy makers fear that, taken together, these trends forecast a perfect demographic storm. [The crisis] will come from a "triple whammy of increasing demand on the welfare state and health-care systems, with a decline in tax contributions from an ever-smaller work force." That is to say, there won't be enough workers to pay for the pensions of all those long-living retirees. What's more, there will be a smaller working-age population compared with other parts of the world...

"[There] are really four different population changes happening in Europe." One concerns Eastern Europe, where trends date from the Communist period and portend a special, and especially virulent, class of social problems. Bulgaria's birthrate is 1.37, and life expectancy for males is seven years less than in Belgium or Germany; the E.U. estimates that Bulgaria's population will drop from 8 million today to 5 million in 2050. Since 1989, Latvia's population has dropped 13 percent; its fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, and its divorce rate is among the highest in Europe...

Was communism better for family building than modern capitalism?!

Germany and Austria are in something of a category of their own. They share many of the same characteristics of other Western European countries with regard to forces affecting family life, but in addition childlessness is peculiarly high in these countries, and has been for some time. A 2002 study found that 27.8 percent of German women born in 1960 were childless, a rate far higher than in any other European country. (The rate in France, for example, was 10.7.) When European women age 18 to 34 were asked in another study to state their ideal number of children, 16.6 percent of those in Germany and 12.6 percent in Austria answered "none." (In Italy, by comparison, this figure was 3.8 percent.)

[But] the true fertility fault line in Europe [runs] between the north and the south. Setting aside the special case of countries in the east, the lowest rates in Europe -- some of the lowest fertility rates in the world -- are to be found in the seemingly family-friendly countries of Italy, Spain and Greece (all currently hover around 1.3). "[We] see that Italy has two records that are maybe world records," he said. "One, young people in Italy stay with their parents longer than maybe anywhere else. No. 2 is the percentage of children born after the parents turn 40..." [The] deeper problem may lie precisely in the family-friendly ethos of these countries. This part of the self-definition of southern European culture -- the "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" ideal -- has a flip side. "In all of these countries," Billari said, "it's very difficult to combine work and family. And that is partly because, within couples, we have evidence that in these countries the gender relationships are very asymmetric."

[The] accepted demographic wisdom had been that as women enter the job market, a society's fertility rate drops. [But] more recently, and especially in Europe, the numbers don't bear it out. In fact, something like the opposite has been the case. [Analysis] of recent studies showed that "high fertility was associated with high female labor-force participation . . . and the lowest fertility levels in Europe since the mid-1990s are often found in countries with the lowest female labor-force participation." In other words, working mothers are having more babies than stay-at-home moms.

[The] hypothesis the sociologists set out to test was borne out by the data: women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and child care are less likely to want to have another child than women whose husbands or partners share the load. [As] Mencarini said, "It's about how much the man participates in child care."

[In] Europe, many countries with greater gender equality have a greater social commitment to day care and other institutional support for working women, which gives those women the possibility of having second or third children. [The] Scandinavian countries have both the most vigorous social-welfare systems in Europe and -- at 1.8 -- among the highest fertility rates. [Norway] guarantees about 54 weeks of maternity leave, as well as 6 weeks of paternity leave. With the birth of a child comes a government payment of about 4,000 euros. State-subsidized day care is standard. The cost of living is high, but then again it's assumed that both parents will work; indeed, during maternity leave a woman is paid 80 percent of her salary.

[While] Italian women tend to be as highly educated as Scandinavian women,[just] about 50 percent of Italian women work, compared with between 75 percent and 80 percent of women in Scandinavian countries. Despite its veneer of modernity, Italian society prefers women to stay at home after they become mothers, and the government reinforces this. There is little state-financed child care, especially for new mothers, and most newlyweds still find homes close to one or both sets of parents, the assumption being that the extended family will help raise the children. But this no longer works as it once did. [The] same economic forces are at work in both northern and southern Europe -- it's just as hard to make ends meet in Madrid or Milan or Athens as in Oslo or Stockholm -- which gives the predominantly two-income families in the northern countries an edge. [In] Scandinavia, thanks in part to state support, the more children a family has, the wealthier it is likely to be, whereas in southern Europe having children is a financial sinkhole, which drags a family toward poverty.

How were "the same" economic forces working before? Some forces and counter-forces must be shifting really unpredictably. Or is there some global development pattern that says there is not much point to bring a child into this world?