There was a kid bubble from 2006-08, with births jumping to more than 4.5 million, so those years are actually the birth-rate outliers.
But the Christian population is falling in statistical terms partly because it has a much lower birth-rate than the Muslim population around it.
It's as if the desire to keep these babies in a country with the lowest birth-rate in the world, was just too much for these baby-starved women.
There is concern over Italy's birth rate - the lowest in Europe - and the economic implications of an ageing population.
More than 60% of the Saudis are under 25, and the birth rate--37 births for every 1, 000 people--is among the highest in the world.
The shortage of places in primary schools reflects a growth in the birth rate - with some areas facing an increase of 25% or above in the primary school population.
Dr Mohamed Taranissi is director of the Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecological Centre in London - which has a live birth rate, as opposed to pregnancy rate of 40% - compared with a national average of 17 to 19%.
He warned about the catastrophic out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks, which was at that time less than 25%.
In the past decade, the birth rate among Ethiopian-Israelis has declined by at least 20 percent.
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The U.S. also has the highest teenage birth rate of any industrialized country -- and teenage mothers in the U.S. tend to have less education, prenatal care, and financial resources than their older counterparts.
Compared to the analagous January-July period of 2011, the birth rate increased by 6.7%, the death rate decreased by 2.9%, and the rate of natural population loss plummeted by 60% (from 138, 000 in 2011 to just 57, 000 in 2012).
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The national rate is 45-47%, including the underemployed and, because of the high birth rate, the workforce is growing by 240, 000 a year.
In response, President Putin has mostly talked about attracting more ethnic Russians back from the other ex-Soviet states, and of boosting the birth rate.
In Japan, according to Ken Okamura, a strategist with Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, the birth rate has been so low that the working-age population will actually start to decline next year.
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Taiwan's diplomatic isolation, low birth rate, and rapidly aging population are major long-term challenges.
And with a birth rate at just 14 per 1, 000 inhabitants--the lowest in South America--it's not getting any younger.
This was the fourth event - the start of a renewed collapse of the birth rate, perhaps its longest and fastest ever, only a year later, quite unlike the more sustained boom of the 1960s and completing a sequence of down, up and then down again in the space of a few years by magnitudes that make you wonder how midwives, hospitals, schools and others coped on this rollercoaster.
Good health and a relatively low birth rate have made Sri Lanka the country with the third-oldest population in Asia after Japan and Singapore.
The good news is that India's birth rate has dropped by more than half in 35 years - from 5.7 children per woman in the mid-1960s to 2.7 in 2010.
The death rate among babies whose mothers planned - and did - give birth at home was lower than the average for all births taken together - including those in a hospital, midwife-led unit, as well as at home.
"It's been a long time since we have had this rate of change -- it probably hasn't happened since the birth of personal computing 40 years ago, " he wrote.
The NAO said the rising birth rate was related to a 6% increase in numbers of women of child-bearing years since 2003, plus older women who did not have babies in the 1990s having them in the 2000s.
When the cohort born roughly in the years between 1993 and 2005 enters prime child-bearing years, there is going to be a pretty significant decline in the crude birth rate even if the total fertility rate (TFR) continues to move modestly higher.
Fifteen years later, the birth rate was still high, and although many women came back to work in the nineteen-fifties, segregation by gender in employment was greater than it had been in 1900, and was more sharply delineated than segregation by race.
The story with the birth rate is not quite as dramatic, but considering that Russia underwent a nasty recession in 2008-09 the fact that births did not decrease (as they did in most other East European countries) should be taken as a positive.
Countering this view has been left to Yuko Obuchi, 34-year-old daughter of another prime minister, who is in charge of reversing Japan's declining birth rate.
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