As we told you a couple of weeks ago, it doesn’t look like the provincial government’s policy of paying cash for live births produced any improvement in the birthrate in the province except for the year they announced the bonus cash.
When you look at the birth rate by age of mother some other interesting things appear.
Let’s start with the 20-somethings. Note: this is a revised version of the post. The original post was based on the wrong Statistics Canada tables.
The number of birth to mothers in Newfoundland and Labrador between 20 and 29 years of age has declined over the past two decades.
Statistics Canada breaks ages down into five year groupings as shown in the table. Women between 25 and 29 continue to have more children than those in the younger group. The difference between the age groups remains roughly 500 to 550 children per year over the entire period.
The older age group had its fewest number of children in 2004 and afterwards the number of babies has increased gradually. The younger group hit the low point in 2005 and likewise has increased gradually.
If you cross reference the number of births by the number of women in each age group, you can see that those slight increases in absolute numbers aren’t particularly meaningful. The rate of child birth for the women between 25 and 29 remained the same in 2010 as it was in 1991; one in every nine women gave birth. For the younger 20 somethings, the rate decreased, from one in 12 in 1991 to to one in 17 about two decades later.
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