Natality and fertility

Purpose and brief description The statistics on births and fertility are compiled based on two sources: the declaration forms for births at the municipal civil registry and the National Register. The first source is the most important and most extensive one. It provides a lot of information on all the children born in the country (de facto births) and on their parents. The second source is the fastest. However, it only provides information on the births of children whose mother is registered in the National Register. By combining these two sources and using the National Register as a basic source from 2010 on, the statistics only record live births to women residing legally in Belgium, regardless of whether these births take place in Belgium or abroad. These births are broken down according to the administrative units of the country, according to the main characteristics of the mother and according to certain characteristics of the newborn child. A number of fertility indicators can also be derived. It is therefore possible to position the level and evolution of the country’s demographic dynamics. The fertility rate by age is the ratio between the number of live births to women of a certain age and the average number of women of that age, for the given year. The total fertility rate (TFR) summarises the successive fertility rates by age and is the sum of those figures. The TFR is the number of children a woman would have in her reproductive years if she lived with the same fertility rate at each age... Population All live births Periodicity Annually. Release calendar Results available 1 year after the reference period Definitions Month of birth: Month of birth, from the date of birth Child gender: Gender of the child Place of birth: Place of delivery: Twin birth: Total number of births, including stillbirths, following the pregnancy Birth order of the child: Birth order of the child in all live births to the mother Pregnancy duration: Duration of the pregnancy (in weeks) at the time of the birth Type of childbirth: Type of help in childbirth Birth defects: Presence of one or more birth defects Weight: Weight (in grammes) of the child at birth APGAR after 1 min: APGAR score after 1 minute. Metadata Births and fertility.pdf