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Hey researchers, bloggers, everyone interested in fertility data! We recently added lots of new data at Our World in Data on fertility rates, ages at childbirth, twin birth rates, birth seasonality, and more. Here's a thread of what you can find on the site! 🧵

Our new data comes from a range of sources including the Human Fertility Database, the UN World Population Prospects, the Human Multiple Births Database, the Human Mortality Database, and more.

First, of course, the total fertility rate — a metric that summarizes birth rates across age groups of women in one particular year. ourworldindata.org/grapher/chil...

The total fertility rate is commonly interpreted as a prediction of how many children women will have on average over their lifetimes. But it doesn't necessarily tell us that. I've written about why in a recent article:

Are women having fewer children, more likely to have no children, or both? You can explore the data on the share of women who have had a given number of births. We can see that two is the typical number of children in many high-income countries. ourworldindata.org/grapher/shar...

Teenage motherhood can be a health risk to both mothers and babies. How common are births among teenage mothers around the world? How has this changed over time? You can explore the data on the adolescent birth rate here: ourworldindata.org/grapher/adol...

What's the average age of mothers at childbirth? This shows the average age of women giving birth in a particular year. You can see it's between 26 to 32 in most countries. Note that this is the average across all children born, not just the first child. ourworldindata.org/grapher/peri...