One in five women leaves work after the birth of their first child.

The Bank of Italy has documented that if we could raise the female labor force share to 60 percent (currently 53,3 percent), as set by the European Lisbon Agreement, Italy's GDP would jump by 7 percent. We wouldn't need anything to find the money to invest, restart the economy, and reduce taxes. With women in work, as in the rest of Europe, we'd already be out of this tunnel. And yet, to women who have children, we give a magnificent gift: a letter of resignation from their jobs.

The latest statistics compiled by INAPP (National Institute for Public Policy Analysis) tell us that in Italy, 1 in 5 women leaves work after the birth of their first child: a proportion unseen in any other European Union country.

In short: despite the avalanche of promises, announcements, and declarations from good souls, emanating from the catacombs of a political system that's out of touch and increasingly detached from society, working women in Italy are not allowed to have children. And this explains, better than any sociological survey, why 5,5 million Italian women (according to ISTAT data), between the ages of 18 and 49, don't become mothers. They can't afford it.

Thus, the ease with which women, once they become mothers, leave the workforce leads to two cumulative wastes. The first is the decline in national wealth, with a human asset—women's labor—that goes unappreciated. The second waste, however, affects everything, because the prospect of having to give up work to have a child discourages many women from committing to family planning, thus contributing to the country's severe demographic crisis.