Hungary

The Hungarian society kept its traditional character in the area of marriage until the end of the 1980s. Trends in childbirth, however, showed radical changes much earlier. Compared to the fertility situation in the 1970s, when the age group born in the middle of the 1950s was at peak child-bearing years, a gradual decline can be found. The turning point was in 1981, when the number of deaths exceeded the number of birth each year. However, the proportion of women who were childless at age fifty-one remained below 10 percent in different age cohorts. The total fertility rate was 1.29 in 1999. These trends mean that, concerning fertility, Hungary does not show the signs of a non-European marriage type (in which the age at first marriage is low, few people remain unmarried, and a high fertility rate exists). A new phenomenon is that the proportion of live births outside marriage is rapidly increasing. In 1990 13.1 percent of children were born out of wedlock. In 1999 this proportion reached 28 percent.

Encouraging families to have more children was one of the key issues of the prevailing Hungarian policy-makers. Different financial incentives and moral-ideological pressure were used in past decades to encourage Hungarian families to have more children. These efforts had little or only temporary success. The majority of Hungarian families have one or two children. As the number of the families without a child was low, so was the number of families with three or more children.