Despite the fact that a negative link between economic uncertainty and fertility is customarily suggested, empirical evidence on the economic uncertainty/fertility nexus remains inconclusive. A reason for this inconclusive evidence is that most of previous research has focused on the role of unemployment as a marker of economic uncertainty, whereas other factors, such as precarious work contracts, have been seldom considered. Using retrospective data from the 2009 Italian Multipurpose Household Survey on Family and Social Subjects, this paper aims to investigate whether and how having temporary versus permanent work contracts affects the individual propensity to have the first child in Italy. To this end, we adopt the potential outcome approach to causal inference, aiming to disentangle inter-individual differences in the propensity to have the first child, and to quantify the overall net effect of work uncertainty on first birth losses or gains.