Health minister Beatrice Lorenzin recently announced that Sept. 22 would be the country’s first ”Fertility Day,” when state-sponsored events in Rome, Bologna, Catania and Padova offer the public information about family planning and encourage parenthood. The government’s campaign aimed at upping Italy’s birth rate, which health minister Beatrice Lorenzin introduced this week, features a series of 12 promotional images that were supposed to be encouraging but came off as oddly threatening and, alas, went viral for all the wrong reasons. Ministero della salute via Twitter 
 
 The Health Ministry posted tweets in August showing a young woman holding an hourglass under the slogan “Beauty knows no age, fertility does.” Another warned: “Hurry up! As Quartz reported earlier this year: 
 
 The average fertility rate in the EU was 2.4 children per woman in 1970, but dropped to 1.5 in 2013, according to the OECD. ”Male fertility is much more vulnerable than you might think,” reads a third, with a picture of a decaying banana peel. In 2015, fewer babies were born in Italy than in any year since the modern state was founded 154 years ago, and the population shrank for the first time in three decades. The Fertility Day campaign also set off criticism on social media for appearing to blame women for putting off child-bearing, and for appearing not to understand the real causes for Italy’s low birth rate. Italy has long offered a generous paid maternity leave, but Italian women who work still battle entrenched prejudices that can make motherhood financially precarious. People aren’t having kids because it’s not possible.” 
 
 Even Prime Minister Matteo Renzi criticized the campaign, telling a radio station Thursday, “I don’t know of any of my friends who had kids after they saw an advertisement.” 
 
 “If you want to create a society that invests in its future and has children, you have to make sure the underlying conditions are there,” he said, citing the need for good jobs and childcare services.
– "Racism is in the eye of the beholder," according to Italy's Health Ministry—and an awful lot of people are beholding just that in ads the ministry sent out to promote a national push for procreation. NBC News reports on the country's much-ballyhooed Fertility Day, an event taking place Thursday that the government hopes will boost the country's flagging birthrate, said to be the lowest in the EU. Events planned in cities around Italy (including Rome) on Fertility Day will include state-sponsored events where locals will be bombarded with baby-friendly propaganda about family planning, specifically about expanding families, per Quartz. The ads around the hot-and-heavy holiday are not only attracting claims of racism, but of sexism, too, with Fortune earlier this month calling the campaign "a sexist mess," while Quartz labeled it "an embarrassing misstep." The campaign kicked off in August, featuring a series of promos that some say are nothing more than fertility fear-mongering. One of the ads shows a woman holding an hourglass with the caption "Beauty has no age. Fertility does." And a pamphlet shows two cheerful white couples with the caption "Good habits to promote," while the caption "Bad company to leave behind" is accompanied by a photo of a black woman apparently smoking pot, while a white woman hangs out with a black man who's drinking. Critics say a) the low birthrate isn't women's problem, and b) the country isn't addressing unemployment, the real reason many people are choosing not to have kids. Even Italy's prime minister is shaking his head. "I don't know of any of my friends who had kids after they saw an [ad]," Matteo Renzi said in an early September radio interview, per Reuters. (If you do want to have a baby, though: Chill.)