At a discussion organised by Alternattiva Demokratika last Saturday, the employment minister reminded us of something that we prefer to forget: we are not having enough children, and we have not been having enough children for so long that there are insufficient people in employment today to pay for the pensions of the future. The current birth rate shows that it can only get worse.

We’re not unusual in this: the very same problem is faced by the rest of the western world. The more affluent societies become, the fewer children they have. Maltese families had more children in the days when Malta was poorer. Indeed, very large families were associated with poverty and ignorance, even here in Malta – though of course, there were exceptions.

Things have changed, though – and Maltese women are never going back to the days of having armies of children as a matter of course. Ironically, it’s the pension system itself that has changed attitudes to having large families. Before the development of a social services network, one’s children were one’s pension. They were even one’s income. The more babies you had, the more people there would be to look after you financially in your old age, and the more hands there would be to bring money into the household until they married, and sometimes even after that. It was a different world, and no one is about to suggest that we return to it.

Also, society cannot have it both ways: either women work, or they have lots of children. We women cannot do both. Even though I worked continuously while raising three children, I would have found it impossible to hold down a full-time job at the same time, even with all the help in the world.

Physical help is not enough. It is the lack of mental and psychological space that’s the problem. The argument that men do both is completely fallacious. Men don’t do both, for the very simple reason that, like women, they can’t do both, and not necessarily because they won’t. When there are children, especially when there are several, one parent has to assume the role of primary carer. If both parents are struggling to hold down full-time jobs or careers, the children end up with no parental primary carer – just part-timers. There’s a price to be paid for that, by all involved.

So getting women into the workforce will mean fewer and fewer children. There are already few enough as it is, even though only a minor percentage of Maltese women are in paid work. The trouble is that the situation in Malta is compounded by the fact that even women with one child, or two children with a gap of four years in between, feel that they have a God-given right not to work. So we not only have fewer babies, but also their mothers are refusing to work while believing that a family has the “right” to live well off a single wage or salary, however small.

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The gist of Louis Galea’s argument was not that women should have more children, or that women should go out and work. It was something else entirely: that the workers and the pensions have to come from somewhere, and if we are not going to produce them ourselves, then we will have to import them, as other countries have done and are doing still.

The reason that the first 15 member states of the European Union have such large immigration populations is not because of charity or the guilty conscience of colonialism. It’s because they needed more people to work and contribute towards the pension system, and their own citizens were just not producing enough babies. Italy, for example, has practically stopped having babies altogether.

Dr Galea argued that at some point, sooner rather than later, we are going to have to consider immigration as a way of redressing the balance between our failure to breed in adequate numbers and the need for more workers and social security contributions. He’s right about this. In fact, the working group on pension reform, which presented its report to the prime minister recently, said: “an immigration policy aimed at mitigating the anticipated decrease in the Maltese population is a necessity.” The prime minister has not commented on this point so far, perhaps because immigration is such a controversial issue right now that the average person has been rendered incapable of approaching the matter with a clear mind.

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Dr Galea did not mention it, but there is going to be another complication to this already thorny problem. Not only are we not having babies, but many of the babies that we do have are planning to hotfoot it out of Malta as soon as they possibly can. With the whole of Europe thrown wide open to them, and far greater opportunities than they could ever have here, nobody can blame these young people.

They are not going to sacrifice themselves in order to be patriotic, just as we women are not going to sacrifice ourselves by going down that fascist road of having as many children as we can to replenish the national stocks, so to speak. When my contemporaries and I were 20, we grumbled ceaselessly about the lack of opportunities (so incomparably worse then than today), and given half a chance, we would have made a dash for it, right out of Malta and never to return.

Malta is agreeable when you are settled with a family. It is not agreeable at all to those who are young and single, or to young couples who are still childless, and have grand plans. Social life is stultifying – there is a limit to how many times you can drive between Marsascala and Mellieha and back again without going stir crazy, and the best job that many can hope for is a complete dead-end.

So, along with the lack of babies, the planners have to factor in the youth-drain (alongside the brain-drain) that is bound to happen as Maltese university graduates begin to get a little braver about living away from home. We are seeing it happen with doctors – others will follow.

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Planned, legal immigration is not the same thing as haphazard illegal immigration – but the general attitude towards both is roughly the same, even among those who are educated enough to know better: here they come, to take our jobs, and “there goes the neighbourhood”. In the current furore about illegal immigration, which seems to have abated somewhat, the argument is made often that Malta is too overcrowded to cope with any more people.

Yet the opposite is in fact the case. From an economic perspective, Malta is not over-populated, but under-populated. There are just not enough people to make things work. The market isn’t big enough to thrive. We are an ageing population, and not a young, burgeoning one like China’s, which is poised to take over the world.

It is pointless flinging abuse around and shouting that Malta is for the Maltese. Those who are not prepared to accept immigration should put their money where their mouth is, and do their bit for Malta by having a baby today, another baby next year, and another one the year after that. They could also consider breeding regularly between the ages of 20 and 45, as women in previous generations did. Somehow, I don’t think they will. Given the choice between becoming brood mares and accepting legal immigration, I have no doubt that they will go for the latter, grumbling and protesting all the way.