Fertility rate among Kiwi women hits record low, lockdown's impact on deaths
The fertility rate among New Zealand women has fallen to the lowest level on record, new births and deaths data shows.
The data also gives some indication of how measures introduced since March to control the Covid-19 pandemic had an impact on the country’s death rate.
Figures published by Statistics New Zealand on Tuesday show 57,753 babies were born in this country in the year to September, while 32,670 deaths were registered.
The total fertility rate was a record low 1.63, which is well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.
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Stats NZ also noted there were 1680 fewer deaths in the seven months from March to September in 2020, than for the same seven months in 2019.
With the Covid-19 pandemic picking up speed around the world, the Government put New Zealand into alert level 4 lockdown at 11.59pm on March 25.
Stats NZ said quarterly and annual drops in the number of deaths happened from time to time, despite New Zealand having a growing and ageing population. But it said the Covid-19 restrictions may have played a part in the reduced number of deaths in 2020.
The fall in this country’s fertility rate is thought to be the result of several factors.
Stats NZ figures show the fertility rate hovered around 2 for much of this century, even getting above the 2.1 replacement level in several years. But it seems to have started trending more clearly downward in the past five years.
Distinguished Professor Paul Spoonley, from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University, said millennials were simply having fewer children or none.
“It’s increasingly none, or one and done,” he said.
Some evidence indicated women who were well-educated and had good jobs were deciding to pursue a career rather than have children, Spoonley said.
“So the fertility rate, particularly for generations now in their 20s and 30s has been declining for sometime and this is an ongoing trend downward.”
He expected fertility to take another hit in the next year, on top of the downward trend, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I think there are two factors there. One is when your job or future is uncertain then why would you decide to have a child, and second why bring a child into a world where there is Covid?”, Spoonley said.
“Some countries have thrown a bucket load of money to try and reverse fertility decline, most obviously in Catholic Europe... It has done nothing to change the decline in fertility.”
Those countries had considerably lower fertility rates than New Zealand and there appeared to be no answer to the decline, Spoonley said.
“If countries that have been much more generous than we have around childcare and health have failed then I can’t see us doing something that other countries haven’t done.”
Despite the fertility rate hitting a record low, the number of births was higher in the year to this September than in the first four of the past 20 years, although well down on the peak year for this century – 64,542 births in 2008.
Stats NZ senior demographer Kim Dunstan said part of the reason for the decline in the fertility rate was that migration had driven population growth in recent years.
The people coming to New Zealand had been concentrated in the working-age groups from 20-39, some were students and many were not intending to have children while they were here, Dunstan said.
New Zealand’s total fertility rate was over 4 in the early 1960s. That did not mean women born in the 1940s averaged four children each.
The number was slightly less than that because changes in the timing of child-bearing in the 1950s and 1960s, to younger ages than previously, inflated the total fertility rate for the early-1960s.