Society

Last year, the fewest children were born in Ukraine since independence

Last year, 187,387 children were born in Ukraine. Most of them were born in the city of Kyiv (19,979 children), Lviv (16,638 children), Dnipro (14,433 children), Odesa (13,736 children), Kyiv (10,820 children), Rivne (9,542 children) and Zakarpattia (9,450 children) regions. This was reported by with reference to data from the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine.

This figure is the lowest birth rate in the history of modern independent Ukraine, the BBC reports. Even in the first year of the war, in 2022, almost 207,000 children were born in Ukraine. For comparison, in 2012, before the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas, there were 520,000 births, in 2019 – before the coronavirus pandemic – 309,000, and in 2021 – 278,000.

Svitlana Aksenova, a senior researcher at the Institute of Demography and Quality of Life Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, believes that 187,000 newborns is a fairly good figure for the second year of a full-scale war.

“I thought the figure would be lower. However, it is still much lower than what is needed for us to have population growth. The most common practice among families now is to postpone having children until a more favourable period for this. This postponement of childbirth actually fits into the logic of a responsible attitude to one’s role as a mother or father,”

– the expert said.

According to her, Ukrainian families began to resort to the practice of postponing births during the coronavirus pandemic.