Fertility

Just for the first three months of 2019, 5,800 abortions were committed in Bulgaria, making the country among the leading countries in Europe by abortion. This is a statistic of the National Center for Public Health and Analyses (NCPHA). Of these, over 3600 pregnancies were ended of patients' own free will.

The government is planning the birth of over 66,000 babies in 2019 - it is clear from the measures in the Demographic Development Plan implementation plan published for public discussion.

Middle-class women can provide the solution to Greece's acute demographic problem if they are offered the right support by the state, said Dionysis Balourdos, research director at the National Center for Social Research (EKKE).

Turkey has become a popular destination for foreigners pursuing in vitro fertilization treatment (IVF) with its successful clinics and cheap prices, according to a professor of gynecology and obstetrics.

Bulgarian women are the youngest to give birth to their first child among the women in the European Union. This shows Eurostat data for 2017. The average age at first birth in Bulgaria is 26.1 years, with Romania and Latvia standing just behind our country.

A special parliamentary committee sounded the alarm Tuesday over Greece's shrinking population, stressing the need for measures to boost birth rates and to ensure "healthy aging" so as to minimize pressure on the health and social security systems.

According to a demographics report it presented in Parliament, Greece's population could drop to as low as 8.3 million people by 2050.

A controversial legislation that was passed by a parliamentary committee on Nov. 7 includes a provision that expands a ban on sperm and egg donations.

Fertility rates in Greece, that is, the average number of children Greek women have, dipped from 1.5 to about 1.3 during its eight-year economic crisis (2008-2016), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said in its World Economic Outlook, issued on Wednesday.

A bleak future lies ahead in terms of demographics, according to the Hellenic Association of Geriatrics and Gerontology, which projects that Greece's population by 2050 will be older and reduced by anything between 800,000 and 2.5 million people. 

The US Business Insider published a paper devoted to ten countries with serious demographic problems.

A special place in the material is also dedicated to the demographic crisis in Bulgaria.

The population of Bulgaria, the European Union's poorest member, may soon become as low as it was in the aftermath of World War II, Bloomberg reported.