Why Is Portugal's Fertility Rising?

I have some answers-- but they're surprisingly incomplete

I’ve written previously about the evidence that French fertility is relatively high because of pronatal policy. High French fertility is not driven by fertility of immigrants: native-born French people have rather high fertility compared to the rest of Europe:

And those fertility rates of ~1.6-1.7 for natives apply just as much to French people with 4 French grandparents as to those with recent immigrant parents; i.e. long-term French families have unusually high fertility compared to the rest of Europe:

However, whenever I show graphs of European fertility trends, one thing always sticks out: Portugal. Portugal’s fertility has risen over the last decade, and not by a small amount. Take this graph, for example, showing that Portuguese fertility rates have rocketed upwards among married couples:

Or this one from one of my recent posts, which shows that Portugal has had one of the strongest fertility trends in Europe in recent years:

You can see only a few countries saw RISING TFRp* values 2013-2020: Hungary, Czechia, and Portugal.

So what’s the deal? What’s going on with Portugal?

But first, some reminders about my upcoming travels! Here are my dates:

San Francisco- March 9-12

Salt Lake City- March 12-13

Austin- March 26-29

In Austin I’m speaking at the Natalism Conference! If you use promocode “LYMAN” you get a big discount, and I get some money too! Cool stuff!

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First: The Overall Trend

Let’s first get on the same page about Portuguese fertility.

In the early 2010s, Portugal’s TFR was about 1.2 or 1.3 children per woman. It then rose to about 1.4 in 2023-2024. Of Portugal and the 12 other Mediterranean and/or Catholic-countries-in-the-southwestern-half-of-Europe I grabbed here as “plausible comparison countries for Portugal” (YMMV), it’s clear that Portugal’s performance is exceptional. It goes from being one of the lowest fertility countries 2005-2015, to being 4th out of 13 by 2024. Ireland is slightly above it, as is Croatia. France is appreciably above it, for Special French Reasons, as we discussed.

Meanwhile, countries which might be seen as reasonable “Portugal proxies” have significant declines. The super-low one you see there is Andorra, now at about 0.8 children per woman. The brown and red lines at the bottom of the range in 2024 are Malta and Spain. Slovenia, Italy, and Greece are just above them. The countries clustered close to Portugal are Cyprus, Hungary, Croatia, Ireland, and Slovenia: none of which are Portugal’s close geographic, cultural, or economic proxies.

So, what gives? Well first, let’s make sure it’s not just a tempo issue. Here’s TFRp* for all those countries we can calculate it for:

As you can see, Portugal’s TFRp* has been more-or-less stable, like Slovenia’s or Switzerland’s, but TFRp* has actually declined in Italy and Spain. Somehow, Portugal is resisting the fertility decline seen in its closest-peer countries.

So how is Portugal hanging in there? Past the paywall, I’ll give the answer!