Interesting observation from the article:
Among the current European leaders without children are Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Theresa May, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of European Commission.
Children are even seen as a nuisance by some in Northern Europe. Many restaurants in Germany will not allow children in but are happy to accommodate pet owners and their dogs! However, it is something of a mystery why Italy, where the “Italian Mother” is celebrated and whose main religion is Catholicism, also has a low birth rate.
Re; your very last sentence, wondering why Italy has such a low birth rate; What is the rate of unemployment in most Italian cities? Are many Italian adults worried about losing their jobs to illegal aliens or robotic systems of downsized industries? This may have something to do with fewer births in this country.
Having lived around in Europe, I will offer this analysis.
In the early part of the 1900s...birth-control was introduced to women. Various groups were against the distribution of the information. A lot of women were tired of the six to ten children routine.
What you see after 1945 is a lessened society (two world wars has killed off a fair number of the general population), and given opportunities for women in the work place. Respect for birth control now became a topic among women.
Professional jobs (lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc) started to become a big reality in the 1960s and 1970s. Women married later on, and started to look more at one or two kid families.
Taxation increased along the way, and today....you will notice a hefty cost (19-percent sales tax is routine in most European countries). Add in the cost of heating choices (oil or gas). Go out and talk rental prices on a 3-bedroom apartment in cities like Hamburg or Koln....most people will be challenged to pay the hefty rental cost.
You can go back to the 1970s and see where governments started to get worried about this, and try to offer ‘tax credits’ as some incentive to have more kids. Well, that was a total failure. Today, the same idiots are trying to offer totally-free child-care and kindergarten seats, if you vote the ‘right’ party into office (this means a hefty amount of taxation to be created to pay for the child-care seats).
For those who think that Muslims come into Europe and practice the five to ten kid routine...that’s a joke. When all you have is a marginal skill to earn your wage, you can’t afford the three or four bedroom apartments in major urban areas. These families all end up in the clinic and get birth control advice, and end up practicing it.
Society, in the end, dumped hefty taxes and high cost into the formula, and people reacted....producing less kids. I did a spreadsheet a couple of months ago with the current German birth-rate, with no anticipated change, and no big improvement on the trend with immigration. In about 1,200 years, the 82-million population of Germany will eventually reach the last 10,000 Germans. Demographic suicide is already on the doorstep.