• Births increased in France in 2021, after six years of decline.

  • INSEE makes the link with the release of the two confinements of 2020.

  • People in their thirties and forties have largely contributed to this revival of designs.

The deconfinements have given the French the desire to enlarge the family.

This is the observation made in an INSEE study unveiled on Thursday.

It indicates that, after six years of decline, the number of births in France started to rise again in 2021. There were exactly 742,100 who showed their faces, or 0.9% more than the previous year.

And the survey makes the link between this resurgence of conceptions and the end of the confinements due to Covid-19, in May then in December 2020. Result: the number of births rebounded in March and April 2021, as well as from August 2021 where, until the end of the year, the number of births was "much higher" each month than in the same months of 2020.

The year 2021 had however also started with a very marked decline in births until mid-February, which corresponds to children conceived during the first confinement, in the spring of 2020. The “context of the health crisis [linked to Covid] and strong economic uncertainty" was then able to encourage couples to "postpone their parenthood projects", explains INSEE, which did not observe the same phenomenon of a drop in births nine months after the second confinement of November 2020.

Those in their 30s and 40s in shape

More “mature” women drove the birth rate up last year, the study also details.

Births increased by 3.5% for women aged 30 to 34, by 4.8% for those aged 35 to 39 and by 5.3% for those aged 40 or over.

On the other hand, the number of births to mothers under 30 is down.



In 2022, the number of births is higher in the first half than in the same period of 2021 but it remains lower than in the first half of 2020.

In detail, the number of births fell in January, nine months after the third confinement, then they increased in February.

But difficult to know at this stage if the baby boom effect is valid for the third confinement, less restrictive than the first two.

Magazine

Can hybrid work become the norm?

Health

Sick leave: "The mental health of young people has been deteriorating for years"

  • Company

  • Babe

  • Covid-19

  • Confinement

  • Demography