POPULATION-YUGOSLAVIA: The Land Of The Old

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Mar 29 2000 (IPS) - The alarm bells are sounding – Serbia is becoming a country of the old as fewer and fewer babies are being born.

The average birth rate during the past decade has reportedly dropped to less than one child per couple.

Radmilla Vicentijevic of the Belgrade Statistics Office says a total of 21.825 babies were born in 1979 compared to 13.912 in 1997. She says one third of the population of 2,5 million people in Belgrade are over the age of 50.

“One can say that this city is becoming the city of the old and the main reason is prevailing poverty which makes people reluctant to have children,” she said.

The Serbian Orthodox Church has blamed the situation on abortion and ordered its clergy to deny holy communion to doctors and nurses who perform abortions.

In a recent statement the church warned that Serbs would be ‘biologically exterminated’ if the practice of abortion was allowed to continue.

However the Association of Serbian Physicians says the problem is not abortion but the critical political and economic situation facing the country over the past decade.

“Birth rates are certainly going to be higher once the economic situation changes and when future parents see that they can bring their children into a society where peace prevails, the economy prospers and people live without constant tension and pressure,” the physicians said in a statement.

Infact, they say, the rate of abortion has dropped rather than increased. “In Belgrade 45.968 terminations of pregnancies were performed in 1983 while in 1997 there were 14.356 terminations,” the statement said.

Vicentijevic agrees. “Abortions? No, women donot plan families that way now. They simply decide not to have children and contraception works,” she says.

Sociologists say the shrinking of population in this country of 7,5 million people is a phenomenon that began with migrations into industrial towns and changes in traditional family life back in the early 60s and 70s.

The average family size at the time was two children per couple. This dropped even further with the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in 1991 and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. The already small generation of Serbs, facing uncertain times with unprecedented economic hardships, decided it would be better to have even less children.

At the same time, since 1991, more than 350.000 young and educated people, aged 25-40, are reported to have emigrated to Western countries in the hope of finding a better future.

“How can I have more children when I’m barely able to feed the one that I have,” says Mirjana Pavlovic (33), a Belgrade teacher.

“My husband and I bring home 3.500 dinars (175 US dollars) a month and we would need more than double to live through the month,” she adds.

“Under the circumstances it is only my child that eats properly now – we don’t need the vitamins, meat etc …I would be insane to want another child,” she says.

Womens associations have accused the Church of lacking solidarity with the hardships facing people.

In a joint statement the womens associations said abortion has been a constitutionally guaranteed right since 1969 and that it was a basic human right to be able to freely decide on having a child.

It called on the church to turn it focus on the real reason why people are reluctant to have children such as the fact that the government has “pushed us into wars and … forced thousands of miserable children to become orphans or refugees..”.

“If the church really cared about the biological survival of Serbs, it should have pointed at those who caused the wars and the overall poverty.

” Women do not want to bring more children into this world now and should not be blamed for that, even if they resort to abortion as the last method of preventing an unhappy life from being led,” the statement added.