The past ten years has also seen a downward trend in abortions, according to the latest Abortion Services Aotearoa New Zealand annual report .

The stats

Newly released figures from Stats NZ on Tuesday show that in 2022 there were 1,719​ births registered to 13 to 19 year-olds. They accounted for about one in every 34​ births that year.

In 2012, there were 3,786​ births registered to teenage mothers: roughly one in 16​ births.

These are very different numbers from those recorded back in 1972.

That was the year teenage births in New Zealand peaked. Statistics report 9,150​ teenage women gave birth, accounting for about one in every seven​ births.

Two years later, in 1974, the Auckland Medical Aid Centre Abortion Clinic opened.​

Teenage births "generally dropped" post-1972 - save for a "small peak" in 2008​. That year, one in every 12​ births (5,223​ births) was registered to under-20 year old mothers.

Stats NZ estimates and projections manager Michael MacAskill​ says teen births had generally decreased since then.

Why the decrease?

For every 1,000 women in New Zealand aged 15-19, there were 11​ births in 2022 - down from 25​ in 2012, a decrease of 55 percent.

Family Planning chief executive Jackie Edmond​ says the drop in teenage births mirrored global trends. It can be attributed in part to an increase in education and access to contraceptives.

It is very clear people need multiple contraceptive options, she says.

Increasing the range and choice in Aotearoa seemed to have made a difference, she notes. Today there are more reliable, readily accessible forms of contraception which have a lower failure rate than other forms.

However, there are still barriers, including cost, limited awareness of the range of contraceptives and health literacy of patients and practitioners.

There will always be unplanned pregnancies because no-one and nothing is perfect, she says. At the same time though, "this shows things have changed - and hopefully it continues".

Improved education also made a difference, with schools offering a range of relationship and sexuality programmes in their curricula, Edmond says.

"But we also know this is patchy. The quality and amount [of such education] is patchy as well."

There are "lots of great teenage parents out there" and many young people did "an awesome job".

At the name time, pregnancy at a young age could have long-term impacts on people's lives, so the downturn was "good to see", she adds.

Source

• Stuff

It explained: "Curiously, Europe's lowest birthrates are seen in countries, mostly Catholic, where the old idea that the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the child-raiser holds strong. . . .

Meanwhile, countries that support high numbers of working women, like [the Scandinavian countries], have among the highest birthrates."

The author called this "the fertility paradox."

These arguments actually have an almost religious hold on the social policy architects of the European Union.

As Jean-Claude Chesnois summarizes, "in Sweden, . . . empowerment of women insures against a very low birth rate."

With Sweden again in mind, sociologist Peter McDonald asserts that "In a context of high gender equity in individual-oriented institutions, higher gender equity in family-oriented institutions will tend to raise fertility."

J.M. Hoem links Sweden's success to a "softening" of "the effects of women's labor force participation on their life sufficiently to reduce the inherent role conflict [relative to motherhood] to a manageable level."

Referring to Sweden, Paul Demeny concludes that "few social policies enjoy greater unqualified support from demographers and sociologists than those seeking" to make "participation of women in the labor force compatible with raising children."

Of course, the deeper source of anxiety driving these analysts has been the plummeting fertility of the European peoples, a continent-wide development. In the year 2014, the 28 nations of the European Union reported a combined fertility of 1.58 live births per woman, only 75% of the births needed to replace a generation.

Almost all of these nations have recorded declines in numbers over the past decades, with deaths outnumbering births.

Moreover, these declines are expected to continue.

Eurostat, the statistics-gathering body of the European Commission, reports—using a set of assumptions concerning emigration, fertility, mortality, and net migration—"that the projected number of deaths in the EU-28 will be higher than the projected number of births for the whole of the period 2016 to 2080."

Furthermore, the percentage of the very elderly (over 80) will increase from 5.1% in 2014 to 12.3% in 2080, while the working-age population will continue to shrink.

The median age of the population is expected to increase by 4.2 years in the same period.

The report concludes, "ageing will continue across all of the EU Member States, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland."

The Eurostat officials' only hope is that "migration has the potential to help delay the ageing process in some of the EU Member States."

However, they acknowledge that "it may also speed up the process of ageing in those Member States which are characterized by a relatively high proportion of their working-age population leaving, for example in search of work."

And not only is the population shrinking and aging. The institutions which historically have held up childbearing are failing.

In Northern Europe, marriage is increasingly rare, replaced by cohabitation; in Southern Europe, young adults increasingly avoid both marriage and cohabitation, refusing to form childbearing unions of any sort.

This is the essence of the joint European family and population crisis of the twenty-first century. Continue reading

In a wide-ranging interview with a journalist from Portuguese radio station Renascença, the Pontiff said he wasn't pointing his finger "at anyone in particular".

"When there is an empty space, people try to fill it," Pope Francis said.

"If a country has no children, immigrants come in and take their place.

"I think of the birth-rate in Italy, Portugal and Spain. I believe it is close to 0 per cent.

"And this not wanting to have children is, partly - and this is my interpretation, which may not be correct -due to a culture of comfort, isn't it?

"In my own family I heard, a few years ago, my Italian cousins saying: ‘Children? No. We prefer to travel on our vacations, or buy a villa, or this and that' . . . .And the elderly are more and more alone."

The Pope said he believed Europe's greatest challenge is to go back to being a "mother Europe" as distinct from "grandmother Europe".

This echoes the speech Francis gave to Strasbourg last November when he described Europe as being "like a grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant".

In the Renascença interview, the Pope said he had confidence in younger politicians to reclaim Europe's leadership role in the world and resist corruption.

He also expressed concern at the very high youth unemployment rates - approaching 50 per cent in some European nations.

Among the issues discussed at length in the interview was Francis's vision for a Church that risks getting "bruised" by going out to those in need.

He also threw in some humorous remarks.

Francis told the interviewer he goes to Confession about every 15 to 20 days and he joked about his confessor: "I never had to call an ambulance to take him back, in shock over my sins!"

Sources

• Renascença
• The Tablet
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Catholic News Agency