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Birth numbers make Nunavut special

One in four mothers are teens; low birth weights common

JANE GEORGE

No matter how you crunch the numbers for live births in Canada, Nunavut’s different than the rest of the country — by a wide margin.

Women are having more babies and at a younger age than any other province or territory in Canada.

And more of their pregnancies likely fall into the high-risk category, because many babies in Nunavut are born with low birth weights, before their due dates, and out of the territory.

“Nunavut is pretty special,” said Leslie Geran, an analyst with Statistics Canada.

That’s the picture that emerges from Statistics Canada’s latest report on live births in Canada during 2004. The report, released earlier this week, shows Nunavut’s live birth-rate bucks nearly every trend in the rest of the nation.

Canada’s crude birth rate (the number of live births for every 1,000 people in the population) edged downward to another record low in 2004. The crude birth rate in Canada declined from 10.6 live births for every 1,000 people in 2003 to 10.5 in 2004.

And Nunavut’s birth rate was also down, by -1.5 per 1,000.

But that’s where any similarities between Nunavut and the rest of Canada end.

The average age of women giving birth in Canada was 29.7 years in 2004, a slight increase from 29.6 years in 2003.

However, the mean age for giving birth in Nunavut was 24.5 years, the youngest in Canada.

Here’s how big the difference was between Nunavut and the rest of the country. For every 100 women who gave birth in Canada in 2004, 30 of them were between the ages 30 and 34 years, and only four were aged 15 to 19.

But in Nunavut the situation is nearly reversed. For every 100 women who gave birth in Nunavut in 2004, 24 were between the ages of 15 and 19, and only 13 were aged 30 to 34.

The young ages of Nunavut mothers present a public health challenge for the territory’s cash-strapped health services.

That’s because the rule of thumb says that the younger the mother, the greater the risk of complications for both mother and child during childbirth.

Young pregnant women are less likely to eat well, get prenatal check-ups and to stop smoking. Pregnant teens run a risk of anemia, high blood pressure, and premature labour. Their children have a higher risk of problems related to prematurity and low birth weight.

This also means additional health expenses, because these young mothers at risk are generally sent south to deliver.

There’s also a long-term social cost, say studies on teen pregnancy. The lower the age of the pregnant teen, the less voluntary the sex was likely to be.

A teen mother will also be less likely to finish high school, and more likely to receive social assistance.

In Nunavut, more women are also giving birth without a wedding ring than in the rest of Canada.

More than two-thirds of Canadian women who gave birth in 2004 were married. In Nunavut, two-thirds of women who gave birth were single.

Nearly half the women in Nunavut gave birth outside the territory — the only jurisdiction in Canada where this situation exists.

But this isn’t stopping women in Nunavut from bearing children, according to the territory’s fertility rate. This estimates the average number of live births a woman can be expected to have in her lifetime based on the rates of a given year.

At 1.53 per woman, the fertility rate in Canada in 2004 was very close to the 2003 average fertility rate for other industrialized countries: 1.56 children per woman.

But that’s not so in Nunavut. Nunavut had a fertility rate of 2.95, the highest fertility rate in Canada in 2004 and one with the same global ranking as the Third World, North African nation of Egypt.

The difference in the fertility rate between Nunavut and the rest of Canada is especially great for teen mothers who are just beginning their childbearing years.

For women 15 to 19 years old, it hit 122.8, compared to 13.7 for the same age group in Canada — that is, nearly 10 times higher.

Nunavut’s fertility rate, for this young age group, is even two times higher than in the Northwest Territories.

Statistics Canada’s report also shows babies born in Nunavut have a lower birth weight and more babies, particularly male babies, were born at less than 37 weeks gestation (that is, less than 7.5 months of pregnancy).

Of 747 births recorded in Nunavut during 2004, March was the most common month for births. November saw the least number of births.

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