Albanian males do not want to raise families; 42% of them do not have children, nor do they intend to become parents

Albania has suffered a sharp decline in fertility because the fertility rate has suffered decline during the transition period. In Albania, the fertility index was 6.8 births per woman in the 1960s, this report dropped to 2.1 a woman in 2001 and 1.7 in 2011 to drop to 1,48 children for 2017. This is lower than the average fertility level in the European Union, which for 2016 was 1.6. A survey by the Institute of Public Health found that among men aged 15-49 who have no children, 42% of them do not want to have children, compared to only 4% of women.

This high desire for adult males not to become parents further exacerbates fertility projections. Albanian women and men prefer small families. Among the currently married population of 15-49, 76% of women and 78% of men who have two children or more do not want children anymore. Only six percent of women and 5% of men want another child, but they would prefer to wait for at least two years to have it. Only 9% of married currently women and 14% of married men aged 15-49 want to have a child or another child soon. Among women with two children, three out of four want to limit the birth of the third child.

The percentage of married women currently wanting to limit the birth of a child geographically, from 55% in Lezha Prefecture to 68% in the Berat and Durres Prefectures. The percentage of men aged 15-49, who want to limit childbearing, follow a pattern comparable to this of women: 67% of 15-49-year-old men don't want more children. This ratio is 78% among those with two children and 92% of those with four or more children. The poll found that, of all births in the last five years and current pregnancy, 89% were wanted at the time of conception, 4% were unwanted, and 7% were not wanted. /Monitor