The table below presents the number of children ever born to women aged 40-44 years in Australia for each year the information was collected since 1981.The table reveals the number of children born to Australian women aged 40-44 years in four different years: 1981, 1986, 1996 and 2006, calculated by percentage. Overall, it is really important to notice that the proportion of women who had three children or more declined gradually during the whole period whilst the converse appeared to be true in women who had no children or less than or equal two children.
Initially, it is obvious that women aged 40-44 years tended to have two children, followed by women who had four or more children and three children, at 27.6% and 27.4% respectively, while the proportion of women who were childless and had one children only had less than one in ten of the total proportion. More broadly, this trend also occurred until the last period.
Eventually, we can see that the proportion of two-child women in early forties broke the record as the highest proportion by climbing considerably to 38.3%, while similar trend experienced to childless women and one-child women, reaching 15.9% and 13.2% in sequence. By contrast, the proportion of women who had three children dropped slightly by around 6%, while a dramatic dip marked in women who had four or more children in 2006.
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