5,023 births were recorded in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country during the third quarter of 2006, which means an increase of 2.9% with respect to the same period in the previous year, according to data from Eustat, the Basque Statistics Office. By territories, in Alava 731 children were born, meaning a 4.1% increase over last year; in Gipuzkoa, with 1,782 births the growth percentage reached 4.8%, whereas Bizkaia experienced the smallest growth index with 1.2%, or 2,510 births.

In terms of sequence, during the third quarter of 2006, over half of these births, 2,939 children, were first children. 1,760 children (35%) came to families in which they were to be the second child, whereas the percentage of children going to families already having two or more children reached 6.5%. Bizkaia (39.2%) was the only Historical Territory where the proportion of families with two or more children was below the 41.5%. average of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country.

Mothers are over 30 years old in three out of every four births

As refers to the distribution of births reference to the age of the mother, there continues to be a clear preponderance of the 30-34 year-old age group, in which 46% of the births take place. This group is followed by the next oldest group aged between 35-39 years with 26.3%. The 25-29 year-old group takes the third place with 17.5%. As for the two extremes, the group composed of mothers below 25 years of age had 5.8% of the births, whereas the group of mothers aged 40 or over contributed with another 4.4%.

Births from unmarried parents take 24.9% of the total, two points over the corresponding third quarter of 2005. In this sense, Gipuzkoa, with 23.3%, was the only territory with lesser statistics in the whole of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country. Mothers in this group were also younger at birth than the set of all the mothers who had children, since 15.4% of unmarried mothers were between 14 and 24 years old at the time they gave birth to their children.

Table 1. Live born in the A.C. of Euskadi. Comparative table

Graph 1: Monthly movement of births