iN NUMBERS: B.C. is dragging down the national fertility rate

Why aren’t young couples having kids anymore?

It could be that owning a home is out of reach and AI is threatening to end the world, if the climate crisis doesn’t get there first, but it’s probably the collapse of “family values.”

Regardless of the reasons, Statistics Canada has released the fertility rates for 2025, and women in B.C. are having fewer kids, and when they have kids the average age is getting older.

Here are the numbers:

• 45,022: Babies were born in B.C. in 2025.
• 374,362: Babies were born in Canada in 2025.
• 32.7: That’s the average age of a mom who had a baby in B.C. in 2025. That’s held pretty steady for the past five years.
• 31.9: That’s the national average age for Canadian moms who gave birth in 2025.
• 1976: That was the year when the national average age for a mother was 26.7 years old.
• 1.04: That was the fertility rate for B.C. in 2025 (The rate is an estimate of the average number of births a woman would have in her lifetime).
• 1.26: That was the national fertility rate in 2025.
• 1.52: That was the fertility rate for B.C. back in 2008.
• 3,340: Grams or 7.4 lb. That’s the median birth weight for babies in 2025.