Closing the Fertility Gap from a lay point of view: The Why Wait Agenda in a nutshell
In this pilot episode, The Why Wait Agenda's founder, journalist Eleonora Voltolina, unpacks the goals and the innately lay values on which the Why Wait Agenda’s agenda is based.
The main objective is not to convince – let alone usher – people to have more kids, nor to have them in the first place. Rather, the aim is to build motivation and alliances to individually and collectively act in order to reduce and hopefully close the “Fertility Gap”. This also means finding ways to enable those who would like to have kids, but feel blocked by external factors, to have them. In other words, ending the vicious circle of people being forced to put off the decision of starting a family.
The choice of using English for the podcast is linked to the fact that the topic of Fertility Gap knows no boundaries: far from being a problem limited to Italy or Switzerland, the imbalance between the number of children people wish to have and the number of children people actually have, is now present in more or less all the economically advanced countries.
This episode also contains the first two audio contents from the audience: a voice message from Eleonora, a 40-year-old journalist and recently a mum, and one from Isotta, a researcher and activist on gender issues in her early thirties, who currently does not have any children. They explain to The Why Wait Agenda podcast their point of view on choosing motherhood.
A heartfelt thanks to Matthieu Mantanus for the amazing theme song, especially written for The Why Wait Agenda podcast!