Births and fertility

Purpose and brief description The statistics on births and fertility are drawn up on the basis of two sources: the declaration forms for births at civil status and the National Register. The first source is the most important and richest. He offers a lot of information about all children born in the country (births de facto) and about their parents. The second source is the fastest. However, he only provides information on the births of children whose mother is registered in the National Register. By combining those two sources and using the Rijksregister as a base source from 2010, statistics only record live births of women legally resident in Belgium, whether those births take place in Belgium or abroad. These births are broken down by the administrative units of the country, according to the main characteristics of the mother and according to certain characteristics of the newborn. A number of fertility indicators can also be derived. This allows the level and evolution of the country’s demographic dynamics to be located. The fertility rate per age is the ratio between the number of live births of women of a given age and the average number of women at that age, for the year under consideration. The total fertility rate (TVC) summarises the successive population figures per age and is the sum of those figures. The TVC is equal to the number of children a woman would have in the reproductive age interval if she continued to show the same fertility rate at any age. Population Totally living births by law Frequency Yearly. Timing publication Results available 1 year after the reference period Definitions Month of birth: Month of birth, taken from the date of birth Gender child: Sex of the child Place of birth: Place of childbirth twin birth: Total number of births, including stillborn, as a result of pregnancy Place of the child: Place of the child in the whole of live births with the mother Duration of pregnancy: Duration of pregnancy (in weeks) at the time of birth Way of giving birth: Type of help with childbirth Congenital abnormalities: Presence of one or more birth defects Weight: Weight (in grams) of the child at birth APGAR after 1 min: Apgar score after 1 minute. Metadata Births and fertility.pdf