Less than 2% of babies born in 2018 have a mother under 20

Paris (AFP)

Some 12,000 of the 759,000 children born in France in 2018 (1.5%) have a mother under the age of 20, reveals Thursday a study by INSEE that points to a decline in "early maternity" in recent years.

Since 2010, less than 2% of mothers have a child before the year of their 20s, says this annual birth survey. Especially in 2018, in metropolitan France, where 8,900 babies were born to mothers born after 1998, or 1.2% of all births.

Including the Overseas Departments, they were 11,700 (1.5% of births). Early maternity (defined here as the birth of mothers before the year of their 20 years) "have never been so few," says INSEE.

In 1973, they were around 60,000 and accounted for 7% of births. Since the 1970s and 1980s, and the laws authorizing medical contraception and abortion, this proportion has never stopped decreasing.

Early births are more frequent in the overseas departments, which have a large population of young women. They represent 10.2% of births in French Guiana, 9.9% in Mayotte, 5.7% in Reunion, 3.8% in Martinique and 3.1% in Guadeloupe.

In mainland France, the Hauts-de-France region exceeds the national average with 2.3% of babies born to mothers under 20 years of age.

According to INSEE statistics, women born in Romania, the Comoros, Haiti and Ivory Coast are the most represented among women under 20 having given birth in 2018. Women born in the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) and China have the lowest proportion of early births.

More than nine out of ten early births (96%) are out of wedlock, compared to six out of ten for all births.

While births to mothers born after 1998 were infrequent in 2018, those of fathers of the same age were even more so. Last year, 2,600 babies were born to a father under 20, which represents 0.3% of births.

The share of early births in France is slightly lower than the European average, 2% according to the figures of 2017. The United Kingdom is the only country in Western Europe where this share is above average.

Four countries in Eastern Europe have high early birth rates: Bulgaria (8.3%), Romania (8.3%), Slovakia (5.1%) and Hungary (4%). 8%), due to the difficulties of access to contraception, underlines INSEE.

© 2019 AFP