High Fertility in a Lowest Low-Fertility Country: How Moroccan Migrants Construct Large Families in Italy

This paper sketches the interrelationship between birth events and the migration process, basing the analysis on migrant women’s life courses (50 participants) and how reproductive decisions have been positioned in their movements between Morocco and Italy. I retrace the ways these women, along with their husbands, construct their fertility choices by considering how different births happened at different moments of the family cycle. I map the process that led these couples to achieve their ideal number of children (2-3) or even larger families (4-6 children), detaching themselves from the fertility norm for Italy, a rate that is dramatically low (1.2 children per woman in 2023). The paper examines how these babies have come into the world, considering pregnancy as an experience that may intersect with planning, desire, surprise, and disappointment. I then show that high fertility is represented by them as a positive outcome that better-off families are able to afford. The well-being of these households is to be considered in relative terms, not only in a monetary sense: conjugal complicity, household harmony, and the proud awareness of having been able to develop such mobility trajectories and family cycles represent further and significant elements of fulfilment. The couples who are able to pursue this set of values, managing to establish solid, affectionate, and numerous households in migration, represent the ideal evolution of the transnational mobilization of reproductive resources that underpins the evolution of these households on the move. Understood in these terms, I argue that these fertility behaviours point to a family pattern that evolves through consolidation and celebration: while planned children are conceived within the consolidation phase of the migratory process, births after the third child are portrayed as an unexpected gift, akin to a celebration of the thriving migrant household with all its roles and rituals.