Infant mortality decreased in 2023. And the natural balance was positive in Greater Lisbon | Demography

2023 will go down in history as a year of recovery: more children were born, fewer people died and the infant mortality rate decreased slightly compared to the previous year. In Greater Lisbon, unlike what happened in the rest of the country, the natural balance was actually positive, with births surpassing deaths, highlights the National Statistics Institute in the note in which this Tuesday lists the consolidated vital data for the year past.

After having increased in 2022 compared to the years of the covid-19 pandemic, in which it reached a record low (2.4 per thousand live births in 2020 and 2021), the infant mortality rate decreased slightly again in 2023, to 2.5 per thousand births. Last year, m210 children under the age of one died, INE specifies in “Vital Statistics 2023”.<_o3a_p>

Furthermore, it was already known that in 2023 the birth rate would increase for the second year in a row, after the historic drop in 2021, in which fewer than 80 thousand children were born in Portugal for the first time. INE now states that 85,699 babies were born alive last year, 2.4% more than in the previous year, which had already been a recovery year compared to 2021.

Statistics also confirm that the number of deaths (118,295) decreased after three years of exceptionally high mortality during the pandemic, when the level of 123,000 annual deaths was always exceeded, with historic mortality peaks, such as what happened in January 2021, the biggest in the last 100 years. This reduction, associated with the increase in birth rates, led to a reduction in the negative natural balance in the country, although it remains significant (- 32,595).

The exception to the negative natural balance scenario was Greater Lisbon, the only region of the country where there were more births than deaths (+461), which had not happened for several years. In a reverse movement, the North region was the one where the most pronounced negative natural balance was recorded (-11,031), says INE.

North counteracts increase in births

In terms of birth rates, consolidated statistics for 2023 indicate that there were more births than in 2022 in almost the entire country, except in the North and in the autonomous regions of the Azores and Madeira.

Most of these babies were born out of wedlock (to parents who were not married to each other), representing for the ninth consecutive year more than half of the total births in Portugal. And the numbers prove that the major trends persist: people are having children at increasingly later ages, although in 2023 the proportion of live births to mothers aged 35 and over will have decreased slightly compared to the previous year, and motherhood in adolescence is less and less common (1.9% last year, compared to 3% a decade ago).

INE specifies that, last year, the average age of a mother at the birth of a child was 32.1 years and, in the case of the first child, 30.6 years. “Between 2014 and 2023, there was an increase of 0.6 years in the average age at the birth of a child and in the average age at the birth of the first child”, he says.

People die at increasingly older ages. In the last decade, “decreases were recorded in the proportion of deaths of people under the age of 65 and those aged between 65 and 79″, while there was an increase of 3.9 percentage points in the proportion of deaths of people aged 80 and more years of age”, highlights INE.

Over the last few years, the number of marriages has been decreasing in Portugal. In 2023, 36,980 weddings took place in Portugal, just 28 more than in the previous year. But there has been a significant increase in same-sex marriages. More than a thousand marriages in 2023 were same-sex marriages – 548 between men and 461 between women. The proportion of same-sex marriages increased by 19.4% compared to 2014.

People are getting married increasingly later – the average age at first marriage was 35.8 years for men and 34.3 years for women last year – more than 70% were already living together before marriage , and the number of those marrying through the Catholic church also continues to decline – just over a fifth of marriages in 2023.