Urgently seeking another boom in baby making

By MICHELE HEWITSON and BRIDGET CARTER

The demographic equation for New Zealand is not adding up to healthy growth.

At one end of the scale statistics show women are no longer having children at population replacement levels. This trend is most pronounced in Auckland. Fertility rates for central Auckland and the North Shore have slipped to 1.7 children and among Pakeha women are down to 1.4.

The national figure is 1.9 and 2.1 is required to replace the population without immigration.

Yet Northland may be home to the highest rate of teen pregnancies in the Western world. Isolating the causes of these trends is concentrating the minds of academics and health authorities.

A Northland Health study due soon will seek to update research of eight years ago that showed women aged between 14 and 18 had more babies than other women the same age in New Zealand, or in any other Western nation.

"It was a bit of a shock wave," said Chris Farrelly, Northland Health's manager for primary and community health care.

Nationally, New Zealand rates second behind the United States for teen pregnancies among Western women, although the trend is also for fewer children (1.9 per woman) and later births (a median age of 29.9). The average age of women having their first child is now 30 and would be higher were it not for the teenage mothers.

Mr Farrelly said poverty, drugs and alcohol were among the many reasons Northland's teen pregnancy rate was so high.

Demographer Janet Sceats says the lower Auckland figures have some depressing messages about choices women are making.

"You assume your urban professionals are the innovators [so] there's a flag showing there about the way we could be going. If that happens, and that trend continues and spreads throughout the country and that happens over the next 15 to 20 years, we are starting to look at a significant problem."

Dr Sceats has just finished work on a study of children and the family in New Zealand, commissioned by the Institute of Population and Social Security in Tokyo.

Women are not having children. "Why bother?" says Dr Sceats. "It's all too hard."

She warns: "Eventual shortages of workers could generate demand for immigrant labour and could force nations to choose between relaxed immigration policies and pronatalist strategies designed to raise birth rates."

Recent data from a study for the New Zealand and Australian Population Association by her husband, Professor Ian Poole, also of Waikato University, threw up the Auckland findings.

If these translate into national figures, New Zealand faces the sort of issues concentrating minds in East Asia and some parts of Southern Europe.

Italy, with a fertililty rate of 1.2, has negative population growth. Greece (1.2) and Spain (1.1) both have zero. The comparable New Zealand figure is 0.7 per cent.

Dr Sceats says women are delaying having children or having fewer of them in part because they are deciding it is all too hard. Those that do have children face putting careers on hold.

"My reaction to that is: men are not asked to do that. In terms of feminism and equality, it's incredibly wasteful for the country in terms of that investment."

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