Ukraine’s birthrate has fallen by 28% since the start of the war, according to new data, with 38,324 fewer babies born in the country in the first six months of this year compared with 2021, before Russia invaded.
While birthrates have been declining by 7% per yer since 2015, according to Ukrainian data analytics company OpenDataBot, the drop from 2021 to 2023 is the largest since Ukraine gained independence in 1991. The next steepest drop was in 2015, in the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
This year, the website reports, an average of 16,000 babies were born a month, compared to as many as 23,000 babies born monthly before Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Even before the war, Ukraine’s population was expected to decline by 50% by 2050, according to the UN.
“Ukraine had one of the lowest birthrates on the planet. And then a war broke out,” Brienna Perelli-Harris, a professor of demography at the University of Southampton who studies fertility rates in Ukraine, told NPR in March this year.
There are an estimated 6 million refugees who have left Ukraine since February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, according to data from the United Nations high commissioner for Refugees.
“When Ukrainians feel and see more stability; when they feel more protection, they will have the desire to have more children,” a doctor who helps run the maternity hospital in western Kyiv told NPR.
One of the defining image of the war is that of Mariana Vishegirskaya, heavily pregnant and bleeding and walking down the stairs after Russia bombed a maternity hospital in Mariupol. Another woman injured during the bombing died shortly after her baby was delivered, with no signs of life, by C-section.
