Buenos Aires | Creating an index to measure the impact of each public policy on families, replacing welfare assistance programs with a “cross-cutting family perspective,” and strengthening parents’ right to raise their children were among the central proposals put forward at the “Freedom for the Future” Political Forum, held on June 23 at the Buenos Aires City Legislature.
The gathering brought together more than 200 people —members of the national, provincial and municipal Legislative and Executive branches, civil society leaders, and experts from Argentina, Chile, the United States and Hungary— who shared a common diagnosis: declining birth rates and weakening family ties require the State to place the family at the center of its policies.
The forum was convened by the international platform Political Network for Values (PNfV), in partnership with Fundación Faro, Argéntea, Instituto Mises Cono Sur, the Global Center for Human Rights and Fundación Free.
The Decline in Birth Rates, Under Debate
Clara Muzzio, Deputy Head of Government of the City of Buenos Aires, argued that the demographic decline cannot be explained by economic factors alone, but also has a cultural component, and pointed to the need for a shift in paradigm: the city she governs, she said, has a “vital deficit,” since 2019 deaths have outnumbered births, and dogs now outnumber children.
“Reclaiming the shared heritage of a people that values life and family is an urgent task. We don’t want to go back to the past — we want to recreate that heritage as a path to securing the free pursuit of happiness today,” said Santiago Santurio, national deputy and PNfV’s Argentine member on its Advisory Board.
Buenos Aires City’s Minister of Human Development and Habitat, Gabriel Mraida, said that broken family ties lie behind many social problems and criticized welfare policies that perpetuate dependency on the State. He proposed placing the family at the center of public policy to strengthen it as the first and most important network of social support.
Carmen Soza, executive director of the Chilean think tank Ideas Republicanas, was the original proponent of this family impact index, part of a “family perspective” approach that would apply across public policy at different levels of government.
Legal scholar Úrsula Basset, director of the Center for Family Law Research, argued that direct subsidies have limited impact without the structural conditions needed to sustain a decision to have children, and that low birth rates also reflect a crisis of meaning and expectations.
Hungary’s Vajk Farkas, of the Center for Fundamental Rights, cited his own country’s experience: over ten years of family-strengthening policies, marriages doubled, divorce fell by 57%, and 75% of births now occur within married-couple households.
For national senator Carmen Álvarez, Argentina’s low birth rate is a symptom of a country that for years lost stability, made housing harder to access, and eroded confidence in the future.
Municipal Governments: On the Front Line
San Isidro Mayor Ramón Lanús said every government should ask itself what it governs for, and that the answer should be obvious and concrete: “to improve the lives of the families in our cities, because it’s in the family that the future is forged.”
Rodrigo Aybar, mayor of Tres de Febrero, cited a municipal maternity support program that enrolled more than 130 pregnant women in just its first two months and will follow their children through the first thousand days of life. He said initiatives like this one have won broad public support and become a point of convergence across the municipality’s various political sectors.
Fernando Rambaldi, of La Calera, described the overhaul he carried out in municipal assistance programs to prevent them from being used for political patronage and to make family well-being a key criterion for governance.
Comprehensive Child Protection and Parental Rights
National deputy Joaquín Ojeda pointed to two emerging challenges for child protection: gender ideology indoctrination in educational institutions and minors’ access to hormone treatments and “sex change” surgeries, and said the current national government has a clear values agenda that leaves no room for gender ideology.
Nahuel Sotelo, a deputy in Buenos Aires province, described how his province’s educational programs —particularly “Identidades Bonaerenses” (“Buenos Aires Identities”)— encourage children as young as four to question their sexual identity without their parents’ knowledge. The province has 140 hormone treatment centers, 29 of them specifically for children. The system, he said, appears designed so that a child who enters public education ends up at a hormone treatment center.
Buenos Aires City legislator Andrea Freguia announced that she had introduced a bill in the City Legislature to protect minors from hormone treatments and sex-change procedures within the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.
The U.S. experience was presented by Laura Bryant Handford, an analyst at The Heritage Foundation, who reviewed legal and legislative controversies surrounding parental rights, participation in women’s sports, and medical “gender transition” treatments for minors.
She noted that several U.S. states have moved to restrict these procedures and argued that, absent consensus for an outright ban, a first step can be a law requiring schools to inform parents about content and decisions concerning their children.
A Shared Agenda
The forum was attended by former Argentine Vice President Gabriela Michetti, who noted it was the first time she had taken part in a gathering on birth rates and child protection with such a broad political representation and so many civil society leaders. She said this was a positive sign underscoring the importance of both issues.
PNfV, the event’s main organizer, is an international platform bringing together leaders from 45 countries dedicated to defending life, the family and fundamental freedoms, whose members take part in a personal capacity. It is a non-denominational, cross-partisan network. Its executive director, Lola Velarde, also took part in the forum.
