Spain’s Birthrate Now Among Lowest in World : Demographics: Its population has virtually stopped growing. As of 1992, its rate had plummeted to 1.2 children per family, a decline of 56%.

At 26, Maria Elena is in no hurry to have children. The first woman in her family to complete college, she relishes her job as a guide in a Madrid museum.

Rafael would like to marry his longtime girlfriend, but apartments are so expensive in Seville that the 31-year-old teacher still lives with his parents.

These two young people help explain a major demographic shift. Spain, which just 20 years ago had one of the highest fertility rates in Europe, now has one of the lowest in the world. Its population has virtually stopped growing and soon will begin declining.

“This is a trend we see throughout Europe,” said Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau, a private educational organization in Washington, D.C.

The bureau’s latest figures show that the annual growth rate for Western and Southern Europe is only 0.1%. “That’s never happened before for an entire region,” Haub said.

What makes Spain unusual is the abruptness of the drop in its birthrate. In 1975, when fertility rates in most European countries already had fallen to about two children, Spanish women still averaged 2.78. By 1992, Spain’s rate had plummeted to 1.2, a decline of 56%.

That was the lowest rate of any major country in the world until this year, when Italy’s also reached 1.2.

Several reasons are cited for the sharp drop in the Spanish fertility rate. “The underlying factor is a shift in values and lifestyles,” said Joaquin Arango, president of the Center for Sociological Research in Madrid.

Women increasingly are going to college, getting better jobs and becoming more independent. This has delayed the start of families.

The fertility rate in the United States is 2.0; France, 1.7; India, 3.4. For the entire world, it is 3.1; for Europe, 1.5.

A rate of 2.1 children per family is considered “replacement level” at which a country’s population, aside from immigration, stays stationary.

Although Spain has been well below this break-even point for many years, it has grown slightly because immigration has increased, and the full impact of the lower birthrate is not yet being felt.

But that anomaly will soon end, said Arango, a member of the Spanish delegation to last year’s International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo.

“Growth already is zero or negative in some areas of Spain, and it will be nationwide by the end of this century,” he said.

United Nations estimates show Spain’s population falling to about 31 million by 2050 from the current 39.1 million, a decline of more than 20%.

According to a government report prepared for the Cairo conference, the average age at which Spanish women marry increased 8% between 1975 and 1990, from 23.4 to 25.3 years.

During the same period, the age when Spanish women had their first child rose from 24.5 to 26.5. Also, the number of marriages is down.

Financial concerns also play a role in these changes. Affordable housing is difficult to find in Spain. Unemployment runs about 17% overall, 33% among teen-agers. As parental expectations have risen, so have costs of rearing children.

The decline and delay in marriages takes on added importance in Spain, where fewer than 10% of births are outside wedlock, contrasted with more than 30% in the United States.

Spanish fertility and population trends raise some eyebrows, because 99% of Spaniards are Roman Catholics. Arango says that the church has not been militant against family planning, and that even if it were, Spaniards would make up their own minds.

A greater barrier to family planning, and a possible explanation for Spain’s late start in reducing birthrates, was the repressive dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Modern contraceptives were difficult to obtain and abortion was illegal during his 36-year reign.

Three years after Franco’s death in 1975, contraceptives were legalized. Abortion was decriminalized in 1985 in three situations--when the health of the mother is endangered, when pregnancies result from rape and when there is risk of a malformed baby.

A 1985 survey found that about 59% of married Spanish women practiced birth control. Arango estimates that the percentage today is 70% to 75%.

“It would be impossible to have the lowest fertility rate in the world without widespread use of contraceptives,” he said. Spain has opened more than 600 family planning centers.

The sharp drop in Spanish birthrates is a mixed blessing. It means less competition for jobs, reduced demands on natural resources, higher per-capita spending for social services and education and less financial stress in families.

But down the road, below-replacement fertility also means a rapidly aging population that will strain health care and pension systems. The over-65 segment of Spain’s population has risen from 10% in 1970 to about 15% today, and is expected to top 20% within a quarter-century.

Public attitudes toward population changes are mixed. “At first, most people were pleased,” said government spokesman Rafael Rodriguez Ponga. “They remembered the terrible ‘Anos de Hambre’ [Years of Hunger] in the 1940s and 1950s, when families had five, six, or seven children and weren’t able to provide them with food or education.”

But attitudes have begun to shift. In a 1992 poll, three-fifths of respondents said they considered the drop in births “bad” or “very bad.”

Even the doubters in the poll didn’t support state intervention to increase birthrates, and the government says it has no plans to take any major actions.

Population experts suggest that while fertility in modern urban societies like Spain’s is unlikely to remain extremely low, it will rise, but not significantly above replacement level.

Spanish women seem to confirm this. Asked by poll-takers how many children they want, most give the same response they’ve given for decades--two.