Israel Has Highest Birth Rate in West
A report on the status of women in Israel in 2004
presented recently by the Israel Women's Network to the Knesset Committee
for the Advancement of the Status of Women indicates that Israeli women
have the highest average number of children in the Western world (The
Jerusalem Post).
The Israeli average is 2.89 compared to 2.5 in Turkey and 2 in the United
States. Of mothers in Israel, some 97,000 are single parents, and 64
percent of them are Jewish. Single mothers head 10 percent of families
in Israel compared to 17 percent in other Western countries.
Women represent 50.7 percent of Israel's population,
meaning that for every 100 men there are 103 women, whereas in the world
at large there are 99 women for every 100 men.
The average marrying age for Jewish women is 24.5,
and for Muslim women 20.5. In Europe the average marrying age for women
is 27.