2023-08-24 14:41:00
Rather gratifying, this return to normal – which would be more of a post-Covid “catch-up” than a real recovery after a decade of declining births – is not, however, the only lesson from the latest official figures published on Thursday. by Stabel.
More deaths than births in Belgium in 2022, this is only the 2nd year that this has happened since the Second World War
A brief overview.
Fewer births in Brussels, the Belgian exception in 2021
Estimated at 3.7% for Belgium as a whole, the rise in the birth rate is even more marked in the two main regions of the country, namely Wallonia (+3.9%) and Flanders (+4 .7%).
Conversely, the birth rate (still) fell (-1%) in the Brussels-Capital region where the authorities recorded 157 fewer births in one year.
A more marked increase in births at the end of 2021
“The month of January 2021 showed a sharp drop in the birth rate (-10.5%) compared to January 2020. The month of March recorded an increase of 3.1% compared to the same month of l ‘last year. These two periods are respectively some nine months after the first confinement and the first deconfinement”, notes the Belgian statistics office on its website.
Initially timid and regionally disparate, the resumption of births proved to be more flagrant in the three regions of the country in the last quarter of 2021. This increase during the last quarter is almost nine months after the end of the restrictive measures decided in from February 2021.
A first child ever later for Belgian mothers
Finally, in addition to the fact that premature births (7.87% of children born in 2021) have also returned to values close to the pre-pandemic values, it must be noted that the average age of the mother at the birth of their 1st child increased further in 2021, from 29.3 in 2020 to 29.6.
Becoming a mother happens later and later: European women are on average almost 30 years old at the birth of their first child.
And according to even more recent, but still provisional, figures, the average age of mothers at the birth of a (first, second, third, etc.) child was 31.2 years in Belgium 2022.
Belgian particularities: it is in Brussels that women become mothers the latest (30.9 years in 2021) and it is in Wallonia that they become mothers the fastest (29.1 years).
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