|
The figures show a winter baby boom has pushed up birth rates to levels not seen for nearly 40 years. The number of women giving birth during the late months of the year has shot up by a fifth in a decade – faster than the increase during the summer. Autumn births have been particularly high over the past two years, according to the analysis. The months in 2010 with the highest fertility rates – the number of children for every woman of childbearing age – were September, at 2.11; October, at 2.09; and November, at 2.03. The lowest fertility rates were in April and May, with 1.92 and 1.93 for each woman. The fertility rate is a figure that expresses how many children the average woman is likely to have over her lifetime. It is worked out by dividing the birth rate in a particular period by the number of women of childbearing age. This means that a spike in births will raise the rate for a particular month. In October, the month last year with the greatest number of births, there were 64,542 newborns, an increase of nearly 27 percent over the same month in 2000. By contrast, the 54,551 children born in the month with the lowest births figure in 2010, February, was a 16 percent rise over the same month in 2000. Babies born during the autumn of last year were conceived during one of the coldest winters for years and January 2009 was the coldest since 1997. | 
