Why I’m happy to have six children (and why I think the Pope’s on my side)

The benefits of breeding like a rabbit

by Nicholas Farrell


Let’s face it. Whatever Pope Francis actually means when his head is in the clouds during those in-flight press conferences of his, we Europeans need to breed like rabbits if we want to preserve Europe. That is not why I have bred like a rabbit, but it is the brutal truth.

I have five children aged 11 down to three — because until the age of 40 I thought I was infertile and did not think I could breed at all, let alone like a rabbit; and because though I am a devout agnostic, I am married to Carla, a devout Catholic, who is much younger than me and refuses to use contraception.

Indeed, I still do fear that I am infertile and that all these conceptions, if not immaculate, are at least miraculous. I am 56, after all. And guess what? Carla is pregnant again, with our sixth child. This terrifies me for all the usual reasons — partly financial but mainly existential. How dare I condemn an innocent child to live in this world which is so appalling and then consign them forever, after death, to the abyss known as nothing?

The only other people with so many children in my neck of the woods here on Dante’s Beach, near Ravenna, are the gypsies (or whatever we are allowed to call them these days). Not even the Muslims (can we call them that any more?), as far as I can tell, have five, let alone six. Italy — where it is still common to meet old men called ‘-Decimo’ (Tenth) — has for decades now had the lowest birthrate in the world, more or less, at just over one child per woman.

But the situation is little better elsewhere in Europe. No European country’s birthrate is much above two children per woman. Indeed, the birthrate is so low and the age of death so high that there is absolutely no way Europe — especially Italy — can afford to pay for the health care and the pensions of its old without massive immigration, and those costs are just the tip of the iceberg.

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