In Spain the average age to be a mother is 31.9 years, the highest in the EU

Every time we have fewer children and at more advanced ages. Spain is the fifth country in the European Union with the lowest fertility rate and the country with the highest average maternity age, 31.9 years. This is reflected in the report on the State of the World Population 2018 of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released a few days ago.

Spain, fifth EU country with lower fertility

Spain is one of the EU countries with the lowest overall fertility rate: 1.4 births per 1,000 women, but not the most.

Ahead of our country is Portugal with the lowest EU rate (1.2 births per thousand women), and Greece, Cyprus and Poland, which register 1.3 births per thousand women. Croatia and Hungary are on par with Spain with the same birth rate.

In Babies and more The best age to be a mother (in biological terms) is 25 years old

Linked to the increase in maternal age, we have fewer and fewer children. Having the first child at almost 32 years old, this also reduces the number of children. More and more women delay the time of having children, increasing the tendency to have only one child, or two at most, and drastically decreasing the number of women who have three or more children.

Highest average maternity age in the EU

Spain is a representative country to study the phenomenon of increasing the average age of the mother in the first birth if we compare it with what happened forty years ago. In countries like Spain, Italy, Japan and the Republic of Korea, the average age of women in the first birth has exceeded 30 years, compared to 24 to 26 years of the 1970s.

The reasons are a conjunction of factors. Among them, that many women leave maternity "for later" and focus mainly on their career, mainly to achieve greater economic stability and to access a home to start a family.

In Babies and more "I delayed motherhood for work": three testimonies of women who would have wanted to be mothers before

Less and less children

As we said, delay motherhood too influences the number of children of the Spanish mothers. If we look at the chart below with a cohort of mothers born in 1974, we see Spain in the queue, being the second country with the largest number of women without children behind Japan, with a measure between those with two and three children and the lowest for those with three or more children.

Video: PHILADELPHIA - WikiVidi Documentary (March 2024).