Demographic Decline: Dutch Birth Rate Plummets

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Oliver JJ Lane

The fertility rate in the Netherlands continues its long-term downward trend as fewer couples decide to have children at all, with economic uncertainty fingered as a potential culprit.

The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for the Netherlands has fallen to 1.49 children per woman, the lowest figure recorded in a bulletin from the nation’s government’s statistical body, the Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS). The number of children couples who procreate have has not changed, the Bureau said, but more couples are choosing childlessness instead.

The plunge in the 2022 figure after a small and short-lived ‘baby boom’ after the coronavirus was reviewed alongside the data from other years by CBS to examine overall fertility trends and the possible causes behind them. Among the findings communicated was that the decline in fertility was seen fractionally more among some groups: “the decline in fertility among Dutch-born women was strongest among young, poorly educated women”.

The CBS suggested this group may find themselves in the most economically precarious situations, and consequently not feeling stable enough to start a family as a reason for the disparity.

Despite the total fertility rate falling rapidly in the Netherlands, the size of a typical family was not, in fact the CBS revealed it had remained stable at 2.1 children since 1981. Women who actually chose to have children were having the same number of children, on average, as ever but the number of women who remained childless to the age of 40 was rising. The CBS expressed this in the bulletin as the difference in the fertility rate per woman compared to the fertility rate per mother.

The body reported: “The decline was solely due to increasing childlessness; the average number of children per mother did not decrease. The average number of children per woman did, because there were fewer and fewer mothers.

Separately, the Guttmacher Institute has previously reported between 1990 and 2019, “The share of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion rose from 26% to 41%” in the Netherlands.

As the CBS noted in their bulletin, “The declining fertility rate is not unique to the Netherlands. Most European countries show similar developments”. As long reported by Breitbart London, Europe is showing all the signs of being headed to a demographic winter, or at the least very considerable demographic change as birth rates flatline and immigration levels soar. In the Netherlands, again, around 15 per cent of the population were born abroad and a further 12 per cent had at least one foreign-born parent.

As reported this year, the French birth rate has now declined to such an extent that the birth-death ratio is nearly equal, something not seen since the Second World War. In Germany, immigration is the sole cause of population growth as deaths outnumber births. In the United Kingdom the fertility rate has fallen to the lowest rate since the 1930s, and one-third of those born are to foreign-born mothers.

The population of Britain continues to surge to record highs nevertheless, as the greatest levels of arrivals in all known human history continue to come to the island, under the government’s extremely liberal border policies.

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