As a child, Clara Di Lello loved Barbie, not the baby doll. With Barbie, she didn’t have to pretend that she liked playing mother-child. “I never had a maternal instinct,” she says today. Di Lello is 30 years old, has been with her boyfriend for eleven years – and is happily childless. It takes courage to say this, because women who don’t want to have children are still stigmatized in Italy. Defamed as not being full-fledged.

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