Fertility patterns

3.1 Total and age-specific fertility rates

Total fertility rate is defined by the CIA Worldbook as “the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime if she were to experience the exact current age-specific fertility rates through her lifetime, and she were to survive from birth through the end of her reproductive life”. Child-bearing years are considered 15-49 but 15-40 is widely used, since the chances to have children for women older than 40 years are limited. Figure 7 shows total fertility rate for Russian women since 1960 while figure 8 provides more detailed data with age-specific birth rates, which are defined as

“live births per 1,000 women in each age-group”.

Looking at total fertility rate, the most evident drop is in the years around 1987-1995, few years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union up to the very first years of transition, when the economy had the sharpest decline. The small drop in the previous decades is in fact in line with other industrialized countries. Total fertility rate, which was still above 2 children per woman in the year 1989, reached the lowest value ever in

22 Available online at www.demoscope.ru, Bullettin N. 81, September 2004 (in Russian).

2000 with 1.2 children per woman, and it appeared to be in a slowly increasing path

Figure 8 describes more in detail how the decision of Russian women has changed through time according to their age. Before 1980, data are available only for selected years. Two main trends are present: on the one hand increasing trend for births at young age between 15 and 29 years which lasted until mid-Nineties; on the other hand, fast decreasing trends for births between 20 and 29 years which started in early Nineties.

The increasing patterns before the Nineties were sustained by extensive public services provided to families by the Soviet Union system, which could alleviate the economic burden of childbearing, if not the time constraints due to the balance between works at home, the amount of time spent queuing up to buy foodstuff and work outside²³, so mothers with more than two children would have priority for queues in shops and families with children used to have priority for bigger houses assignments, while day-care for kids, all levels of education and health care were universally provided. With the economic crisis, births rates declined for all age-groups, in a cyclical trend: as economic conditions worsen, fertility rates decline. The same pro-cyclical trend, which would predict higher fertility rates with the improvement of life conditions, is not found in all age-groups after the year 2000 when economic growth started but only for the group 25-34. To see if a postponement effect of childbearing is emerging, the analysis would require data on completed fertility for different cohorts, which however are not available at this level of aggregation. For this reason, here I will discuss only the pattern of maternal age at childbirth at the national level and discuss more in detail the issue of postponement with individual level data.

3.2 Maternal age at childbirth

The demographic indicator which must be combined with age-specific birth rates to find the determinants of the decline in fertility is the age of the mother at childbirth, in particular for the first child. As shown in figure 9, this value did not change significantly through decades: it was around 24 years old for first-time mothers in the Sixties (who were the cohort of late Thirties-Forties), it declined to a value of 23 years from the Seventies to the year 2000 and since then it is now 24-25 years. It is worth noting that 24 years is the age that defines the threshold between the age groups 20-24 and 25-29. This purely computational threshold could explain why - despite the evidence of no postponement effect among Russian women - in figure 8 birth rates for these two groups have opposite trends after the year 2000 – with births decreasing for women aged 20-24 and increasing for women aged 25-29 - and eventually converge to the same level in 2008.

23 See Stone (1969) for some insights on daily queues in Soviet Russia.

but Russian women do not seem to be affected by the phenomenon of postponement of first motherhood as is happening in other European countries. In fact, the drop in age-specific birth rates in figure 8 is common to all age-groups (20-24, 25-29 and 30-34) and not only to the first one. The cohort born in the Seventies has been the most affected by all the phenomena related to transition: born and raised in a system where the State virtually cared for every aspect of life like health care, education, employment, housing, this cohort was the one who suffered more from the failure of the system. For fertility decision, they found out that housing was becoming less affordable, daily-care for children would not have been provided anymore by all firms and, as a first thing, the labor market they expected did not exist anymore. For the age-group 25-29, combining figure 8 and 9 for all-orders birth the drop can be considered as a drop in second births:

25-29 years old women are generally not first-time mothers and mean maternal age at all order-birth is slightly increased, but is still between 25 and 27 years since 1990. This group is the focus of the more recent policies analyzed in section three and adopted to boost fertility, which tend to balance the decision to have children with the high participation rate of women in the Russian labor market

3.3 Mean age at first marriage

Although available starting only from 1996 in figure 10, data for the mean age at first marriage for both men and women do not provide evidence of a consistent increasing

path. It is indeed in line with the age of the mother at first childbirth and age-specific fertility rates analyzed so far. For men, from 1980 to 1996 the age of the grooms increased on average only by .5 year, while for brides it actually decreased by few months with respect to the Eighties. For the same time period, 2/3 of the marriages per 1,000 females involve women younger than 25 years of age²⁴

Mean age at first marriage

21 21.5 22 22.5 23 23.5 24 24.5 25 25.5

1980 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996

Males Females

Figure 10 – Mean age at first marriage

Data source: Generations and Gender Program, Contextual Database

3.4 Abortion rate

The practice of abortion in Russia is widespread and much diffused than in Western European countries (figure 11). Russia has been the first country in the world to legalize abortion in 1920. The practice then became illegal in the Stalin years up to 1955. It is now legal on request of the woman up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, and at any stage of the pregnancy for medical reasons²⁵.

24 Generations and Gender Program, Contextual Database. Available online at www.ggp-i.org

25 Federal Law 22 July 1993, N. 5487-1 and amendments

Data source: Generations and Gender Program, Contextual Database

In 2007, for the first time the number of births has been higher than the number of abortions: 1.6 million births and 1.3 million of abortions were registered in Russia. The numbers have decreased much after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when oral contraceptives became available, but Russia still had 1.4 millions abortions in 2009, whereas in other Eastern countries as the Czech Republic, they do not reach 25,000. In 2011, President Medvedev signed amendments to the law so that women are better informed about the risks of abortion on health and future chances of having children.