Children of Migration: The Transnational Making of Population

This chapter sketches the interrelationship between birth events and the migration process, basing the analysis on women’s life courses and how reproductive decisions have been positioned in their movements between Morocco and Italy. I explore 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 reconstruct the process that led these couples to achieve their ideal number of children (2–3) or even larger families (4–6). I examine how these babies come into the world, considering pregnancy as an experience that may intersect with planning, desire, surprise, and disappointment. I also explore the employment of contraceptives and abortion. The investigation traces the context surrounding these births, highlighting how children come about to establish and ensure the household despite elements of adversity. Here, I develop the core argument of the book regarding the transnational making of population, showing what relational, material, and moral resources these couples rely on to be able to have and raise offspring in the context of immigration. In doing so, I highlight in the conclusion the pattern underlying the construction of high fertility in a lowest low-fertility country such as Italy.