National Birth Rates
According to the CIA's The World Factbook, the country with the highest birth rate is Niger (at 51.26 births per 1,000 people). The country with the lowest birth rate is Japan, at 7.64 births per thousand. Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, has a birth rate of 7.42 per thousand.)
Compared with the 1950s (when the birth rate was 36 per thousand), the birth rate has declined by 16 per thousand. In July 2011, the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced that the adolescent birth rate continues to decline.
Birth rates vary within a geographic area. In Europe as of July 2011, Ireland's birth rate is 16.5 per 1000 (3.5 percent higher than the next-ranked country, the UK). France has a birth rate of 12.8 per thousand, while Sweden is at 12.3.
In July 2011, the UK's Office for National Statistics (ONS) announced a 2.4 percent increase in live births in the UK in 2010. This is the highest birth rate in the UK in 40 years. However, the UK record year for births and birth rate remains 1920 (when the ONS reported over 957,000 births to a population of "around 40 million"). In contrast, the birth rate in Germany is only 8.3 per thousand—so low that the UK and France (which have smaller populations) had more births in the past year.
Birth rates also vary in a geographic area among demographic groups. For example, in April 2011 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the birth rate for women over age 40 in the U.S. rose between 2007 and 2009 and fell in every other age group during the same period.
In August 2011 Taiwan's government announced that its birth rate declined in the previous year, despite the fact that the government implemented approaches to encourage fertility.
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—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
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“In the U.S. for instance, the value of a homemaker’s productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar and the big number was attributed to the husband’s pain and suffering.”
—Gloria Steinem (20th century)