2022 Births in Norway Hit 38-Year Low, with YoY Decline the Largest Since 1972

Last time as few people were born up north was 1985, and back then, the resident population stood at 4.1m--yet, public health officialdom pretends that there's nothing to see here

Over the weekend, I read up on a recent report by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (IPH), which has the awesome title ‘Annual Report of the Medicinal Birth Register 2022’ (orig. Årsrapport for Medisinsk fødselsregister 2022), which you can find here.

First up, why not rely on ‘official’ data from Statistics Norway (Statens Statistisk Sentralbyrå)? Easy, because their next update will come in March 2024…

Second, some house-keeping, for I’ve written about the rapid decline in births before:

Covid in Norway: Live Births Nosedive (-10%) in 2022, Marking a Record Low Unseen in the Past 25 Years

Live Births in Norway Continue to Decline in 2023

As always, the below excerpts come to you in my translation and with my emphases added.

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From the IPH’s ‘Annual Report…2022’

The final figures for 2022 were published on 15 November 2023 in the Medical Birth Registry's statistics database, which has figures dating back to 1967. The purpose of this report is to publish selected statistics for the [medical birth registry] for 2022 and show trends for the last ten-year period from 2013 to 2022…

Registration of all pregnancies after 12 weeks' gestation is mandatory in Norway. The figures are important for understanding health trends in the population, and the outcomes of changes and any differences in health services for pregnant and labouring women and their newborns. The data also provide a basis for planning health services and measures to improve public health. The information in the database is of great interest and is used by researchers, health authorities, the media and the general public both nationally and internationally.

While birth rates in Norway continued to decline in 2022, the average age of mothers increased slightly. There was an increase in the proportion of pregnant women diagnosed with high blood pressure in pregnancy, pre-eclampsia, or gestational diabetes this year. More and more births were induced, almost a quarter of all births in 2022, but the caesarean section rate remained relatively stable. There was a clear decrease in stillbirths from 2021 to 2022. At the same time, it was seen that the positive trend from previous years with a declining proportion of children dying in the first day, first week, and first month after birth continued in 2022.

So far, so banal, albeit there’s this weird ‘increase in the proportion of pregnant women diagnosed with high blood pressure in pregnancy, pre-eclampsia, or gestational diabetes this year’. Let’s see if the report has anything to say about this, eh?

Accompanying Table 1, we find this piece of prose:

After a significant increase in the birth rate in 2021, the number of births fell from 56,672 in 2021 to 52,026 in 2022 [a change of -9% yoy]. You have to go all the way back to 1985 to find such a low number of births [but Norway’s population was almost 31% lower back then; 2022: 5,425,270 vs. 1985: 4,145,845]. The number of births followed the same pattern, with 55,899 births in 2021 and 51,264 births in 2022. However, the total number of births in 2021 and 2022 was as expected based on previous years. It may therefore appear that the increase in 2021 and subsequent decrease in 2022 was related to the special situation during the pandemic. [telling, eh? I’m certain they don’t mean it could have something to do with ‘offering’ these modRNA injections to pregnant women…]

Source.

As I said above, Norway’s population was almost 31% lower back in 1985, which allows us to kinda calculate (guesstimate) the discrepancy between the decline of the nominal birth rate in 2022 (-9%) vs. the relative decline, which is, of course, much higher (lower) due to the lower population back in 1985.

Since population numbers were about a third lower in 1985 but there was approx. the same number of children born, I think the relative decline is way, way, way (i.e., about 3X) worse than the -9% shown here.

Leaving these hypotheticals to more numerically literate people, I wish to point out one other thing: yes, like other Western societies (and also non-Western ones, with perhaps the exception of North Korea and certain pockets of peoples elsewhere), birth rates were falling for decades. Still, Norway’s -9% in year-on-year births is something quite to behold, esp. as this way exceeds the trend line.

‘Complications’ During Pregnancy

Moving on to the section on ‘complications’, the report says the following:

We saw an increase in the proportion of pregnant women diagnosed with pre-eclampsia (pre-eclampsia) and gestational hypertension in 2022. While 2.5% of pregnant women had pre-eclampsia in 2019, the trend was increasing in the following years, until 2022, when 2.9% of pregnant women were diagnosed. Similarly, the proportion of women diagnosed with high blood pressure (hypertension) during pregnancy rose from 1.7% in 2019 to 2.1% in 2022.

Now, I don’t know if these increases are due to the Covid injectables or not, but let’s not mince words here: even if they aren’t, the tone of the report doesn’t pay justice to the 16% increase in pre-eclampsia and 23.5% increase in hypertension in the annual report talking about year-on-year changes, I don’t know what could be alarming.

Also, note that ‘pre-eclampsia’ is a ‘multi-system disorder specific to pregnancy’, which, as the Official Account (Wikipedia) holds, is ‘characterized by the onset of high blood pressure and often a significant amount of protein in the urine’ (so, please don’t ask me where, in the year after the Covid modRNA products were pushed on pregnant women, excess ‘protein in the urine’ might come from…).

I’m not kidding you, by the way, but note that the above paragraph is followed immediately by the below paragraph:

The clinical guidelines for how the diagnosis of pre-eclampsia should be made were changed in Norway in 2020, which may have affected the recorded prevalence of the condition. The rare but serious conditions severe conditions, eclampsia and HELLP, are still rare in Norway, with eclampsia reported in 0.04% and HELLP in 0.12% of all pregnancies in 2022.

Note that HELLP syndrome is ‘a complication of pregnancy’ (source)

The acronym stands for hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, and low platelet count…Symptoms may include feeling tired, retaining fluid, headache, nausea, upper right abdominal pain, blurry vision, nosebleeds, and seizures. Complications may include disseminated intravascular coagulation [!!!], placental abruption, and kidney failure.

I’m not a medical doctor, but these symptoms of an otherwise rare and unknown syndrome sound a lot like…the thing that must not be named in polite society.

What Does the IPH, Legacy Media Say About This?

So far, mainly crickets, and I only ‘found’ that report a few days after it was first published during my now-routine check of the IPH’s website.

The situation isn’t much better (ahem) with legacy media, which has so far been quite mum about the report. Sure, it’s a rather technical report, but it’s interesting to note one other aspect:

Once a year, in early March, Statistics Norway updates its annualised database for public consumption. This year, the IPH published a very brief news item, dated 28 March 2023, which reads:

There was an upswing in the number of births in Norway in 2021, but in 2022 the situation was the same as before the pandemic: Also in 2022, fewer children were born than the year before. These are the actual birth rates last year and twenty years ago:

• 2003: 57 393

• 2022: 52 011

The figures have now been published in the statistics database of the Medical Birth Registry (MFR), which has registered births in Norway since 1967, when 67,217 children were born.

‘Women are getting older and older when they have their first child, and the birth cohorts are getting smaller and smaller’, says senior consultant Liv Cecilie Vestrheim Thomsen from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. [Ms Vestrheim Thomsen is also the lead author of the annual report discussed above]…

Many Explanations for the Decline

There are many possible explanations for this decline in birth rates. The development in Norway is in line with international trends where birth rates are declining, the age of women giving birth is increasing, and birth cohorts are getting smaller.

‘There may also be natural variations in the figures based on the size of the birth cohort when the women themselves were born. Furthermore, it is possible that the figures we are now seeing are partly a late effect of the Covid-19 pandemic—in other words, that the increased birth rates in 2021 were partly caused by couples who wanted children bringing forward their plans’, says Liv Cecilie Vestrheim Thomsen.

So, nothing to see here (or in the Medicinal Birth Register, which does not offer data, or allows for a merging of the vaccination database with the birth registry, at least not officially).

It’s curious to observe the intellectual contortions at-work: the 2021 increase may be a side-effect (no pun intended) of the WHO-declared, so-called ‘pandemic™’, but the 2022 decline is, of course, ‘in line with international trends’.

About these ‘International Trends’

Now, these comments by the lead author of the above report got me curious. So, I headed over to the birth register database provided by Statistics Norway (source) and obtained the publicly available information (all births, 1972-2022); granted, there’s a bit of an uncertainty (Statistics Norway’s 2022 numbers aren’t as granular/updated as the above report, but this is irrelevant for the following analysis.

If you’d like a copy of the Excel file I was using, please email me.

Main Findings

• At no point since 1972 did birth numbers vary that much on a year-on-year basis as they did from 2021 to 2022 (-9%).

• On average, birth numbers declined by minus .575 percent from 1972 through 2022, with the main outliers being 1988 (+6.5%) and, well, 2022.

How far is the 2021/22 change an outlier?

• If 2022 is excluded, the average decline becomes smaller and is ‘only’ some minus .375% from 1972 through 2021.

• In terms of the magnitude of decline, there are but two other years that come (somewhat close): 1975 (-6.5% relative to 1974) and 2001 (-4.5%).

So, when Ms. Vestrheim Thomsen says the following:

The development in Norway is in line with international trends where birth rates are declining, the age of women giving birth is increasing, and birth cohorts are getting smaller.

I haven’t double-checked the ‘international trend’ lines, and I’m aware of the other aspects cited being true.

Still, the -9% decline is far in excess of anything we’ve seen, or Statistics Norway discloses official data about, since 1972.

Care to explain, dear Institute of Public Health?