Barbora Fidlerova had her birth plan all laid out -- but last year her local maternity hospital closed, forcing her and her partner to race through wintry, mountainous Czech countryside to reach care when the time came.

"It was my first delivery and I was afraid we wouldn't make it on time," Fidlerova told AFP in the southwestern town of Prachatice, recalling the 45-minute drive to a city which still had maternity care. 

As she spoke she cradled her son Dominik, now aged three months, safe in his car seat. 

Fidlerova's local maternity hospital had shuttered because not enough people were using it -- a casualty of record-low birth rates in the country, part of a trend across the developed world that is increasingly raising alarm. 

The birth rate hit its lowest point since records began in Czech Republic last year, with just 77,600 children born across the country of some 10.9 million people. 

Four maternity hospitals including the one in Prachatice have been shuttered since 2024, with mothers shuffled to hospitals further afield and even across the border in Germany, where they can face language and administrative barriers.

Petra Benesova was lucky -- she gave birth to daughter Tereza in Prachatice just days before the maternity ward closed.

"They angered many people. The birthing room was freshly renovated and had to close," she told AFP. 

The Czech Gynaecological and Obstetrical Society requires at least 600 deliveries a year for a hospital to remain open -- a level the hospital in Prachatice was not meeting. 

It is not alone.

Viktorie Plivova, a spokeswoman for the largest Czech health insurer VZP, said that one-third of 84 Czech maternity hospitals failed that criterion and that six more may have to close this or next year.

"The number of children born at Czech maternity hospitals has dropped by more than one-third over the last decade," she told AFP.

'Disintegration'

Prague sociologist Daniel Prokop gave a litany of reasons for the drop in birth rates.

They included housing shortages, economic concerns, the work-life imbalances that women in particular face, and above all, he said, a growing number of single people over 30.

"This is due to social media and ways of communicating, to the pandemic which restricted contacts, to social disintegration," Prokop told AFP.

Other countries in the European Union are grappling with similar challenges. The bloc as a whole registered an average of 1.34 live births per woman in 2024, down from 1.53 in 2021. 

The trend has seen some regions come up with creative solutions: the French town of Saint-Amand-Montrond recently offered a 1,000-euro ($1,147) bonus to mothers to give birth at the local maternity ward and help preserve it.

Slovakia, which formed one country with the Czech Republic until 1993, recently moved to keep five maternity hospitals in remote districts open after protests when the previous government earmarked them for closure. 

But it, too, is facing falling birthrates, with numbers slumping to 42,019 births in 2025 from 57,969 in 2017. 

Slovak Academy of Sciences demographer Branislav Sprocha said the steady decrease in the country of 5.4 million people was in part down to the baby boomer generation ageing out of having their own children.

But he also cited the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, growing prices and a worsening living standard of young Slovaks as factors contributing to "a reproductive climate that is far from ideal". 

Both Slovakia and the Czech Republic have been able to maintain their population despite the falling birth rates largely owing to Ukraininans fleeing there after Russia invaded in 2022. 

'A vision'

The Czech government in office since last December has vowed to "adopt measures that will enable each family to have as many children as it wants without losing its living standard".

It has pledged to increase child allowance and subsidise parents in need, among other things.

But Prokop said that while such measures were useful, they would not radically increase birth rate.

"They can't do anything to resolve the main problem" of people reluctant to seek partners, he said.

"The government should also offer some kind of vision to reduce uncertainty," he said, pointing to a bleaker and less tangible problem. 

"A vision that would show what Czechia will look like in 30 years. We don't have that."