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Fertility in Germany
Despite the Berlin Wall and the fortified boundary that divided them,
the two Germanys had many similar demographic developments in the postwar
period. In the late 1950s and especially in the 1960s, both Germanys experienced
a "baby boom," stimulated by increased economic prosperity and a heightened
sense of security. During the second half of the 1960s, East Germany's
population grew slightly, an unusual occurrence. In West Germany, the
absolute peak in births, 1.3 million, was reached in 1965. In that year,
births outnumbered deaths by 417,504.
After the baby boom, both countries experienced periods of zero population
growth when the annual number of births failed to compensate for the annual
number of deaths. As of 1993, with the exclusion of foreigners' births,
deaths have outnumbered births every year since 1976 in the old Laender.
Since 1986 the same has been true for the new Laender. When the
West German total fertility rate reached its historic peacetime low of
fewer than 1.3 children per woman of child-bearing age in 1985, popular
newsmagazines caused a sensation with cover stories that warned of the
eventual disappearance of the Germans. In the former GDR, a pronatalist
policy temporarily had modest success in boosting the birth rate in the
mid-1970s, but the population declined there for two reasons: emigration
and low fertility. This was especially noticeable after the fall of the
Berlin Wall in November 1989 when emigration soared. Low fertility also
continued to be a problem. Between 1989 and 1991, eastern Germany's total
fertility rate fell by 38 percent. In 1991 the rate was 0.98, well below
West Germany's lowest level.
Although its population was just one-fifth that of West Germany, until
1986 East Germany officially topped in absolute terms West Germany in
both the number of births outside marriage and the number of abortions.
This situation was accounted for in part by a chronic lack of birth control
choices in the former Soviet bloc and the practice of using abortion as
a regular means of curbing unwanted pregnancies. In 1988 one-third of
all births in the GDR were to unwed mothers, whereas in the FRG only one-tenth
were. The trend of out-of-wedlock births in the east continued to increase
after unification. By 1992 nearly 42 percent of the babies born in the
new Laender were to single mothers, compared with 12 percent
in the old Laender.
Until mid-1993, when a more restrictive West German law came into effect,
the eastern section of Germany recognized the right of abortion on demand.
The highest rate was reached in 1972, when one-third of pregnancies were
aborted. By 1989 the rate had declined, but the probability of an abortion
was still one in every four pregnancies. In the old Laender,
legal abortions were restricted to special circumstances based on such
factors as the physical or mental health of the mother or fetus. In 1989
West Germany officially registered 75,297 abortions, compared with about
74,000 for East Germany. Social, cultural, and economic factors accounted
for the differences in frequency of abortion and extramarital birth rates.
Following unification, a trend termed demographic paralysis was observed
in the former East Germany when the number of births fell by 50 percent
between 1990 and 1993. From 1988 to mid-1993, the crude birth rate fell
from 12.9 per 1,000 to 5.3 per 1,000, an abrupt and precipitous decline
unmatched in an industrial society in peacetime. Especially hard hit by
skyrocketing unemployment and adrift in an alien market economy, record
numbers of women in the new Laender stopped having children.
Some reports indicated that by the summer of 1993 as many as two-thirds
of working women in the east had lost their jobs since unification. In
that same year, the marriage rate fell by half.
- Population
- Immigration
- Women In Society
- Marriage
- Fertility
- Mortality
- Age-Gender Distribution
- Social Structure
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capitals, climate)
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