The coronavirus pandemic is causing the birth rate in Spain to drop sharply. Between the beginning of December and the end of January, the number of births dropped by 22.6% from the same period last year.
Civil records show that in the last month of 2020 and the first month of 2021, 45,054 newborns were registered, a decrease of 13,141 births compared to the same period last year. This number is based on information from 3,929 registries that provide online records, accounting for 93% of the total population.
In January alone, compared with January 2020, the number of newborns in Spain’s entire civil registry decreased by 6,889, a 23% drop. In contrast, between January 2019 and January 2020, the decline was only 1.7%.
Available data from the National Bureau of Statistics (INE) shows that the birth rate in early 2020 has dropped sharply, with a greater downward trend. A record of 360,617 births has been set in 2019, which is the lowest annual number in the historical series that INE started in 1941.
However, in the first half of 2020, a new record of 168,047 births was created, which is a decrease of 4.2% from the 2019 data in the first half of the year. Complete data for 2020 has not yet been provided.
The decline in the birth rate will exacerbate the overall decline in the fertility rate in Spain. The fertility rate in Spain has been declining for many years. The current average is1.23 children per woman, compared with 2.8 in 1975.
