In 2013, a majority (51.2 percent) of women in the European Union (EU) gave birth to their first child when aged in their 20s, while 40.6 percent became mothers in their 30s. In addition, more than 127,000 births of first children in the EU in 2013 were to women aged less than 20 (teenage mothers) and around 65,500 to women aged 40 and over. On average, women in the EU were 28.7 years old when they became mothers for the first time.
Among the 5.1 million births in the EU in 2013, nearly 1 in 5 (or more than 880,000) concerned a third or subsequent child.
The highest shares of births of first children to teenage mothers were recorded in Romania (15.6 percent of total births of first children in 2013), Bulgaria (14.7 percent) and Hungary (11.0 percent), ahead of Slovakia (9.9 percent), Latvia (9.1 percent) and the United Kingdom (8.2 percent). On the other hand, the lowest shares were observed in Italy (1.8 percent), Slovenia (1.9 percent), the Netherlands (2.2 percent), Luxembourg and Cyprus (both 2.4 percent).
At the opposite end of the age range, the highest proportions of births of first children in 2013 to women aged 40 and over were registered in Italy (6.1 percent of total births of first children in 2013), Spain (5.1 percent), Greece (4.1 percent), Luxembourg (3.8 percent) and Ireland (3.4 percent). In contrast, shares of less than 1 percent were recorded in Poland and Slovakia (both 0.7 percent) and Lithuania (0.9 percent).
In 2013, more than half of the women giving birth for the first time were aged in their 20s in a large majority of the EU Member States. Notable exceptions were to be found in the following Member States where the majority of first births were to mothers aged in their 30s: Spain (59.4 percent of births of first children concerned women aged 30-39),Italy (54.1 percent), Ireland (52.7 percent) and Greece (51.9 percent).
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