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Beginner / Blickwinkel / IMAGO
Around 524,000 children were born in Germany from January to August.
That is 1.3 percent more children than in the same period last year, said the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden, citing preliminary figures.
In previous years the birth rate was down.
Whether the numbers show a corona effect is difficult to say in view of the only slight increase, said the demography expert at the Federal Statistical Office, Olga Pötzsch.
This also applies to an abnormality in the numbers, namely a significant increase in the births of siblings - i.e. second, third and further children - between March and April compared to the previous year.
The pregnancies began in June and July 2020 when the pandemic situation had meanwhile eased after the initial lockdown.
"This is an unusual development, but it is unclear whether it is a corona effect," said Poetzsch.
Parents who already had another desire to have children may have preferred this because they would have had more time for the family.
In 2020 the number of births had decreased.
With 773,144 newborns, around 5,000 fewer babies were born than in 2019, as the statisticians had already announced in July.
According to the Federal Office, the decline in births is mainly due to the fact that the number of women in the particularly high-birth age between 26 and 37 years of age fell slightly for the first time since 2011.
However, the number of babies per mother hardly fell: According to statistics, women had an average of 1.53 children in 2020.
This “total fertility rate” was only minimally below the value in 2019, when it was 1.54 children per woman.
However, this figure fell for the fourth year in a row.
For the births in 2020, the average age was 31.6 years for mothers and 34.6 years for fathers.
kha / dpa