The first new baby in Portugal for 2015 was a girl, delivered at midnight +55 seconds in the Centro Materno Infantil in Oporto.
The parents thought it would be just another visit to the hospital but the timing could not have been more auspicious as less than a minute into 2015 they had claim to the first born for the new year.
The overall birth rate for the year was slightly up on 2013 with 114 more babies successfully delivered than the year before but the numbers are still a long term concern to government actuaries.
In Braga hospital the first baby in 2015 was Inês who joins her six year old brother and Isaac was born in Aveiro hospital to a family with two siblings.
Hopefully this year will see a resurgence of pregnancies as the austerity period seems to be grinding to a close with many economic indicators pointing in the right direction.
Let’s hope that by the time baby Maria Constança realises what is going on around her that Portugal has managed to integrate into the wider EC and that the current period of taxing the population at record levels to pay for government ineptitude and continuing waste will be a thing of the past.
