There have been no births in Italy in the past three months.
This is not true. While the number of births in Italy dropped to a historic low in 2022, there has been an average of 32,370 births per month between August 2022 and 2023. Local papers have also reported birth announcements more recently.
Multiple posts on social media are claiming no babies have been born in Italy in the past three months. This is not true.
One video sharing the claim, which appears on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok, says: “Breaking news [...] Italy achieves unthinkable world record, no births in three months. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the entire country of Italy. They have not seen a birth in three months.” Comments on one post suggest the supposed lack of births is a result of vaccines.
In a different video, a woman refers to a blog post that appears to be the source of the claim. Its publication date is listed as 4 October and it has the title: “Italy achieves unthinkable world record. No child births in 3 Months”.
However, the claim is false both today and when the blog was originally published.
The most recent data on births published by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) shows there were 31,105 births in June, 33,753 in July and 33,093 in August 2023.
According to these figures, the average number of births per month between August 2022 and 2023 was 32,370, with the lowest being 26,899 in April 2023. ISTAT confirmed to Reuters that preliminary numbers for subsequent months were in a similar range.
Moreover, birth announcements have been published by local media throughout September, October and November.
As reported by fact checkers at USA Today, the original blog post had been removed from the website, Medium, on 28 November, but it appears to have since reappeared. Full Fact has contacted the platform about this and will update the article if we receive a response.
As well as the blog, the woman in the video also shows screenshots of articles from CNN and Reuters as evidence of the claim. These articles from May and April 2023 respectively report that births in Italy have dropped to a historic low of less than 400,000 in 2022, but they do not claim there have been no births at all.
Full Fact has seen many other examples of unevidenced claims spreading quickly on social media, including that myocarditis after Covid-19 vaccines kills one in five or that the CEO of Pfizer said he wanted to decrease the population by 50%.
Image courtesy of Janko Ferlič
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there have been births in Italy over the past few months.
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