Year of the baby

Maternity wards are full to bursting, pregnant women can be spotted all around the place. So why shouldn't we be talking about another baby boom? JOHN McCRONE investigates.

Please don't call it a baby boom says the lady from Statistics New Zealand. Please don't even call it a baby blip just yet. Don't use any of the "B words".

But yes, she confesses, for some mysterious reason, a lot more Kiwi women are having babies this year. In the September quarter, the national rate was up 5.5 per cent. Here in Canterbury it was up 7.6%, Southland 9.5% and Nelson an astonishing 20.1%.

Hospital delivery wards are groaning. Midwife Dawn Kremers, of Pregnancy Matters, Barrington, says the beds are chocker.

"Our case loads are full. We're having to turn away women every day," Kremers says.

Canterbury District Health Board maternity services manager Jane Waite assures the system is bearing up -- she does not want us printing another of those naughty bad-news health-service stories.

But Waite admits, because of staff shortages especially, it is pretty tight. And the 2007 baby bumplet, or whatever statisticians will end up calling it, is still continuing.

Waite turns to check her latest spreadsheet. In November 2005, Burwood, Lincoln, Rangiora and Christchurch Women's maternity units dealt with 390 newborns. In November 2006, the figure was 448. This November, it was up to 481.

Seven years ago when the new Christchurch Women's Hospital wing was being planned, all the projections were for a decline in birth rates. So what is going on?

Birth rates are something of national consequence. Of national pride even.

Obviously surges and dips make trouble for everyone. Hospitals get no warning, so have to cope as best they can. Schools and the playgroup industry at least get a few years notice so can downsize or upsize accordingly.

For business, sudden demographic changes create new marketing opportunities. Even a 5% change in some target age bracket could make or break a sales person's year.

And once a population lump has been created, it has to work its way to the end of the python's tail. Everyone knows the baby-boomer story.

Well, they don't really, says Waikato University professor of demographics Ian Pool. But first, what about this mysterious bumplet?

Pool, being an academic, immediately wants to draw back to the historic picture. A single year is always a blip in his book (and Pool has just co-authored a 470-page volume, The New Zealand Family From 1840: A Demographic History). He says you need to appreciate the greater context.

Birth rates are an issue all round the globe because, simply put, population growth equates to economic strength. Young people are a resource and too many oldies in the population are a drag. Much of the Western world has the problem that it is rapidly greying. As people get better educated and earn more, they have fewer children. Yet country to country, the record is remarkably patchy.

Pool says right now in Europe there is a north/south divide. The healthy fertility rate for a society is 2.1 children. This is the replacement rate with every couple having two kids and a little extra to cover mishaps. Countries can also import youth by increasing immigration. However, for more insular societies, that is not a hugely preferred option.

Pool says the Mediterranean south has undergone a fertility collapse. The fertility rate of good Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain have slumped below 1.5. Russia and other former Communist Bloc countries have also plunged down the fertility rankings.

By contrast, northern Europe -- Sweden, Ireland, France, Denmark, the Netherlands -- has taken to breeding again. After a slump, rates are up above 2.0 once more.

What is the demographer's explanation? In the case of former Communist regimes, it is the shock of going free market. Wealth and personal freedom -- along with relationship instability and career uncertainty -- make for the familiar recipe of couples not in a hurry to have kids and perhaps putting it off until it is too late.

Italy and Spain are showing a similar reaction, but in response to greater religious and social freedoms.

Northern Europe has been going the opposite way, largely because as welfare states with good parental leave, workplace creches and other support systems, their societies make it possible for women to have both children and a career.

Pool says there are other cultural factors, such as the willingness of Scandinavian men to pitch in with the housework.

France is the demographers' test case. Out of all countries, it has kept the smoothest track. Unlike neighbouring Britain and Germany, it has not had the socially disruptive ups and downs. Its fertility is at the magic replacement rate. Recently French statisticians smugly revealed that by 2050, the country's population should pass 70 million.

Pool says the credit is given to France's comprehensive package of family-friendly policies. Making it easier for career couples to cope with babies is the way to push national fertility up those vital few ticks.

So perhaps we have an answer for New Zealand's recent experience? With this year's latest baby bumplet, our national fertility rate has achieved the 2.1 mark for the first time since 1992. And we were doing none too shabbily with a 2.0 average for the last decade or so.

The Japanese -- whose fertility rate is below 1.3, prompting a notorious lament from the health minister about low productivity in the nation's ``birth-giving machines'' _  commissioned Waikato's demographics team to find out why New Zealand was managing to buck international trends.

So like France and Scandinavia, it must be our family-friendly workplace policies and tax regime?

Ian Pool snorts derisively. We all know the reality is rather different. He says  the deregulation of the Rogernomics era stripped away such fripperies. We are a country of small businesses anyway, most too small to afford Scandinavian levels of parental leave or subsidised creches.

No, international comparisons show us bumping along at the bottom of any family-oriented league tables, working the longest hours and with the fewest child-care benefits.

Even so, three terms of a Labour-led government have seen some return to labour laws and tax concessions like the Working For Families scheme. Along with the relatively sustained economic boom, couples might be feeling that starting a family, or having an extra child, has become more of a possibility.

Pool says this could certainly be part of the reason why births have been inching up for the past five years and shown another small acceleration this year. But the story looks more complex. For a start, birth rates around the country are more varied once you look into the detail.
Anne Howard,  at the Statistics New Zealand Christchurch office, pulls up the numbers. She points out that while parts of the South Island like Canterbury and Nelson leapt in the year to September, others such as Tasman, Marlborough and the West Coast showed little change or even a decline.

``When you are talking somedhtimes about just a few hundred births in some regions, you don't want to read too much into those annual fluctuations. A few more or less births can proportionately seem like a lot,'' says Howard.

She checks the figures for Nelson. In the year to September 2006, there were 508 births. Then the 20% leap to 610 this year. But, a-hah. Go back to 2004 and there were 572. So if the range of annual fluctuations is around 100, 2006 and  2007 could just be the low and high of that range.
Nationally, the figures become more secure. But Howard says what is looking like a 4% or 5% hike overall for 2007 could still prove a passing fluke rather than herald some concrete trend.

Howard combs the data for further pointers. Is there a certain age bracket or ethnic group responsible for the 2007 surge? (Sorry _ potential surgelet.)

The ethnic story is a big one with demographers. In New Zealand, immigrant Pacific families have more children. Yet their contribution is almost exactly cancelled out by the low fertility of Asian immigrants. Pakeha are also not big breeders, leaving the somedhwhat higher Maori fertility rate to account for much of the Kiwi success in the baby-making stakes.

However, ethnicity does not seem to play a part in this year's bumplet, says Howard, as all the racial groupings look to have upped their game.

What about mothers' age then? We know women have been leaving it later to start their families. The median age for giving birth to a first child has risen to 28. So, perhaps, we are seeing a late rush to procreate from mothers whose biological clocks are ticking furiously? There could be other factors here, like improvements in hormone-fertility treatments. More older mothers might be being enabled to have babies, and more multiple births might result from such treatments.

There is also infant mortality to consider. New Zealand is a strictly mid-table performer here. Still, improvement in health care has meant that despite the trend towards older mothers, baby deaths have dropped from 14 per 1000 in 1977, to seven in 1997, to five in 2007. But Howard says mortality and fertility treatments could only be tiny contributors to recent figures. This year's increase is interesting because it is taking place across the board. All age brackets are seeing higher numbers.

By now we are grasping at straws. Howard reckons if there is a cause, and it is not just a statistidhcal anomaly, there must be a lot of little things adding up. There are social possibilities like repartnering. So many marriages now break up quite early, and so many second marriages want to cement their union with a child, that this might be having an impact.

Pool raises some longer-term demographic drivers. He points out the New Zealand post-war baby boom was quite unlike the US one most people talk about.

``Theirs ended in 1963. Our baby boom didn't end until 1973. It went on a decade longer which gives our population quite a different profile.''

Pool says even the old Pakeha managed to pull out the stops during this time. ``If we exclude Maori, Pakeha rates in the baby boom were still in excess of any other Western developed country. We reached between 4.0 and 4.1 births per Pakeha woman in that period.''

Such demographic booms have their echoes, he says. As the lump moves down the python, a group of women will be reaching their reproductive peak a few decades later. Then their children could create yet another burst of procreativity decades after that. Bolstering the trend, there is  what is known as the nostalgia effect, where children who have grown up in large baby-boomer-type families tend to want to
recreate large families.

Pool says this combination of effects could be playing out at the moment. The  daughters, in their late 30s, of baby boomers might be taking their last chance at the same time as the early-20s granddaughters are reasoning why wait if they intend to have a larger brood.

Yet Pool admits the across-the-board nature of this year's hike, where even 25 to 30-year-olds are joining in, puts paid to any single-factor scenarios he can think of. Pool says one thing we do know from demographic surveys is that Kiwi women want to have more children, and have them earlier. The lack of a stable relationship is cited as the  No. 1 problem. Then come the obvious factors of a good income, their own home and a career.

``It's clear that a lot of women feel they have no reproductive choice. They are really forced to stay in the work force because couples need two incomes to afford a mortgage. Or they feel they can't have a baby without harming their careers.''

Pool says we will have to wait to see if 2007 marks some shift in attitude where more women are acting on their reproductive desires, or whether it just turns out to be one of those statistical quirks.

Long term, as the baby-boom effect works its way through the New Zealand population, demographers had been expecting New Zealand fertility rates to start heading southwards, going from Scandinavian to Mediterranean.

This is still the prediction, so Pool says we could even be witnessing a last hurrah here. There might be a concertina-ing effect with youngsters deciding why wait _ the economic pain is what it is _ and older mothers grabbing their last opportunities.

In this case, the current modest rise would be followed by an even sharper future fall. It is all rather baffling really.

But hang on a minute, muses Pool. What was on the TV schedules nine months before September? The Super 14 season was a little thin and the programming really not that flash. We might have been enjoying some summer nights after an unseasonably chilly December. Perhaps there is a very mundane explanation for this year's bumplet after all. Again, only time will tell.

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