Retirement age for women in Bulgaria has gone up by 10 years in the past decades, and, adding another 10 years of postponing the birth of a first child, it turns out that Bulgarian women are spending 20 more years of their lives working, depriving themselves of maternity leave, and their children of maternal care.

According to National Center of Public Health and Analyses data the average age at which women give birth to their first child has been going up over the past 10 years (now over 33, even 40). In just one year – 2016-2017 – the number of children born of mothers over 40 went up to 2,108 from 1,974, more than half of them (50.7 percent) having given birth to a first child. The steady tendency of postponing giving birth to a later age is accompanied by reproductive problems and brings the number of children per family down to one. The number of one-parent families has also been growing in recent years, and the patriarchal family model, in which grandmothers and other family members help raise the children, has been disintegrating.