The births of a nation

We keep having children - more than anyone else in Europe

Sat Sept 11 2010 - 01:00

We keep having children - more than anyone else in Europe. But who would decide to start or expand a family in a recession, asks Sheila Wayman

LESS THAN 15 hours before I meet him, Riley Hanbury took his first breath. Now, swaddled in a starry blue blanket, he waits with his parents to be discharged from hospital into the outside world. They don't hang around in Our Lady's. Half the mothers in this 36-bed postnatal ward at the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital, in Dublin, move out every 24 hours, by both choice and necessity.

Like many mothers who have had straight-forward births, Laura Harford is very happy to be able to go home early under the community-midwifery scheme, knowing that a midwife will be out to check on her and her baby for the next three days. The 24-year-old looks remarkably fresh this Friday morning after delivering her 7lb 3oz son, her first baby, at 8.50pm the day before. Equally, the hospital, which dealt with its highest number of births last year – 8,812 babies – is glad to get the bed back. With an average of 25 babies arriving every 24 hours in the delivery suite on the floor above – and up to 40 a day at the busiest times – Harford's bed will not stay empty for long once she, her partner, 25-year-old Jason Hanbury, and Riley head home to Tallaght.

Despite the severe downturn in the economy the babies keep coming. The Republic's rate of 16.8 children born per 1,000 inhabitants in 2009 was the highest in Europe; the EU average was 10.7. When job losses, pay cuts and rising personal and national debt dominate the news, it seems a precarious time to take on responsibility for the upkeep of a new Irish citizen for at least the next 18 years. Who, you might wonder, would decide to start or expand a family just now?

Explanations abound about the reasons for the continuing high birth rate, such as couples having sex more often because they're staying home, or because there is a new recognition of the importance of family at a time when some of us have little else, but the answers lie principally in demographics: there is a bulge in the number of 29- to 36-year-olds, who are the peak-child-bearing group. A significant proportion are immigrants who are well settled here – more than a quarter of births last year were to foreign mothers. So, unlike a decade ago, the Coombe rarely sees unbooked deliveries or immigrants leaving it late to seek care.

Harford, who works in a creche, is "not at all worried" about being able to provide for Riley – or the sibling she is already planning for him after she and Hanbury, a hotel worker, get married in 2012. When it comes to childcare, she is hoping he can work shifts that minimise the period they are both away from Riley, leaving only a few hours a day for her mother to mind him.

A photograph of a smiling boy on a table at the end of Harford's bed is a reminder of how precious life is. He is her only sibling, Paul, who died when he was 14, after being diagnosed at the age of three with Leigh's disease, a rare disorder causing degeneration of the central nervous system. "He would have been 27 tomorrow," she says quietly.

Considering the economic climate of the past two years, Tony Fahey, who is professor of social policy at University College Dublin, says he is surprised that 2009 saw only a 1 per cent drop in births from the previous year's total of 75,065 – the highest recorded since 1896. It is too early, however, to judge the long-term effect of the recession on the birth rate.

Although emigration has picked up in the past few years, the effect of the downturn on family formation will depend very much on what happens in the next five to 10 years, he says. It is mostly people in their early to mid 20s who are leaving now. "They are the ones who will be having children in a few years' time, but they may have come back by then."

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether the recession is going to change the family-planning decisions of the people who stay. "During the boom it was the first births that were the driving force [in the increased fertility rates]. In addition, what makes Ireland stand out is the degree to which even middle-class families go on to have a third or fourth.

"In a recession will people say, 'Well, we won't have the third'? It is not something that is going to happen very quickly." People having children operate on longer time horizons. "I think that is the only way to explain why Irish people are willing to have so many children despite the cost of childcare," says Fahey. Working couples in Ireland spend 29 per cent of their net income on childcare, compared with an average of 13 per cent in countries that belong to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. That intense childcare period is relatively short-lived. "You are looking to the next 20 to 30 years, rather than the next two or three, when you are thinking about what your plans in life are," adds Fahey. "Having a child is something that has consequences for the rest of your life, not something you decide on the basis of what is going to happen in the next two or three years."

If you thought about it too much you might decide there is never a good time to have children, says Liz O'Sullivan, a 28-year-old who is expecting her first baby in November. But she and her husband, Eamonn, a graphic designer, wanted to make sure they were financially steady before starting a family. "He has had the spreadsheets out," she says with a smile. They think two or three children would be the ideal.

The couple had first-hand experience of the recession's sting when she was made redundant from her job as a PA at an architectural firm days before their wedding, in May last year. "But I have been lucky and found another job," says O'Sullivan, who now works just across the road from the Coombe hospital.

It means she did not have far to come for her check-up today with Paula Barry, one of the hospital's midwives. The waiting room is packed, with women sporting bumps of varying sizes occupying rows of fixed seats while men stand against the walls. The recession has prompted a noticeable shift to public care, away from the private consultants, whose rooms are in a separate building.

"I would not consider private care," says O'Sullivan, who had the midwifery service strongly recommended to her by friends. She knows some people think that paying for a service brings security, but she is "really confident" about the standard of care she is receiving.

Unemployment and a decline in economic prosperity are likely, based on past trends, to lead people to delay having children, says Jane Gray, senior lecturer in sociology at NUI Maynooth. That will probably increase the proportion of people who never have children, although, she notes, in countries where childcare is not well developed, such as Ireland, the availability of part-time work for women is the strongest positive driver of the birth rate – and the phenomenon in this recession is that the biggest increase in unemployment is among men. But "you would have to assume that the household's overall level of prosperity is going to feed into people's decision-making".

It remains to be seen, she adds, whether the underlying trend in Ireland is towards declining fertility, as in other northern European countries. "We have always been a bit different, but the signs were that we were converging; then the boom came along and made us different again. The question is, are we different or is the boom an oddity?"

Twenty-year-old Sarah Murphy is walking the corridor of Our Lady's ward with a pair of silver-coloured rosary beads entwined around her fingers – one each for the twin girls she gave birth to four days ago, at 34 weeks. Her own mother, who has raised eight children, was with her for the deliveries.

The smaller of the twins, Alannah, who weighed 4lb 3oz at birth, is one of 17 babies up in the neonatal unit, where staff are braced for the arrival of triplets from a woman scheduled for a Caesarean section later in the day. Aleigha,who was born only two ounces heavier than her sister, sleeps peacefully in a cot beside her mother's bed. Two boxed pink teddies sit on the shelf above.

Murphy hopes the twins will be reunited within the next 24 hours – and that the three of them will soon be off home to her parents' house, in Dundrum. She and a brother still live at home; their six siblings have flown the nest. But now her parents will be welcoming grandchildren number nine and 10 into the house.

The Celtic Tiger may be dead and gone, but the cycle of life goes on.

How do we choose how many children to have?

Healthcare, childcare and birth control are just some of the factors that influence our decision to bring a life into the world. Another is cash: how much of it we have, and how much we think we'll have in the future. As most people are less well off in a recession and less certain about their future finances, one would expect bad economic times to depress birth rates, as women put off getting pregnant. That's what happened during the Great Depression, in the 1930s, and conventional wisdom for a long time thereafter gave great weight to economic factors in explaining birth rates, says Michael Murphy, professor of demography at the London School of Economics.

But the relationship between economic vitality and birth rates has become muddied, according to Prof Murphy, and academics remain divided about the key factors affecting people's decisions to have children.

Ireland's birth rate over decades, including right now, illustrates the hard-to-predict nature of fertility trends and the uncertain impact of the ups and downs of the economy. Despite three years of economic woes, the total number of births fell only slightly in 2009, and they look likely to rise, or at least remain stable, in 2010: Dublin's maternity hospitals are busier this year than last, according to Prof Fionnuala McAuliffe of the National Maternity Hospital.

Statisticians have been collecting numbers on our birth rates for a century and a half. As one might expect, the long-term trend is towards lower birth rates. But economic factors seem to have had little impact on fertility between the start of the 1940s and the end of the 1970s but a much bigger one since. Until 30 years ago Ireland's birth rate was not only unusually high compared with most other western European countries'; it was also unusually stable. There was, for example, no significant change between the emigration- blighted 1950s and the sunnier 1960s.

Then, as the population inched up because of less emigration, that stable birth rate meant that, in absolute terms, the number of births was rising. In 1980 wailing reached a crescendo in the country's maternity hospitals, with a post-independence peak of 74,000 arrivals. But after 1980 the numbers fell away quite rapidly, to trough at 48,000 in 1994. That decline in the birth rate was the most dramatic since records began, in 1864: it fell by more than a third.

The start of the 1980s also coincided with the last big economic slump. This seems to support the idea that recession puts a damper on fertility. But as many other factors were also at play, including more easily-available birth control and women starting families later, recession can be only a partial explanation.

The case for economic conditions playing a major part in decisions to have children is strongest in the period from the middle of the 1990s, when an economy that had plodded for decades broke into a sprint. The change in economic fortunes coincided exactly with a marked rebound in the birth rate, which continued during the boom years: by 2008 the number of newborns surpassed for the first time the high set in 1980. Although one must avoid conflating correlation and causation, it is hard to think of factors other than the birth of the Celtic Tiger that could account for the baby boom.

What if a woman doesn't want to be pregnant?