I have been asked if by zooming out, when thinking about European births, a different picture might emerge (similar to the U.S. wildfires and other legerdemains in the climate circus). I therefore harvested annual births data, 1950-2022, from Wikipedia’s demographics pages. Here’s the data for 25 of the 26 countries in my monthly births collection (England & Wales are missing because data for 2022 will only be made public later this year), plus Ireland, Bulgaria and Greece (basically, everything but the Balkans and the very small states).
Summing up births over all countries in the sample, we get this diagram:
Annual births were pretty stable (around 7 mn per year) until the end of the 1960s. They then started sliding, came to a halt only around 1995, stayed on the 4.5 to 5 mn plateau until 2017, and plunged again. So, it is not impossible that 2022 is just the continuation of a trend, maybe exacerbated by a general feeling of crisis (but then, why the uptick in 2021?).
However, I will keep watching. For example, I did the following. For each year (1954-2022) and each country I computed the difference between the number of births in that year, and the median number of births in the four preceding years (as I did with the monthly data). I then counted how many of the differences were negative. The result can be any number between 0 and 28, but should be 14 on average if there is no trend in the data. Subtracting 14 and flipping the sign of the result I got:
Negative numbers indicate years where more than half of the countries in the sample recorded fewer births than the median of the four preceding years. For example, the years 1993 and 1994 were relatively bad (-11 means that only three countries recorded more births than the 1989-1992 resp. 1990-1993 median). The year 2022 is the only year for which births went south in all countries.
The year 2022 is the only year for which births went south in all countries.
Very interesting!
Very interesting follow-up, per Marlon1492's suggestion, thanks.