Pregnant Immigrants Living in Portugal. Reasons for Leaving Their Country

Introduction: In recent years, Portugal assisted a change in population movements. From being a country of emigration Portugal has become a country of immigration. Portugal began to receive people from various regions of the world, including Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America, with different socio-demographic realities.

Objective: Identifying the motives which brought these pregnant women to immigrate to Portugal

Participants and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional, with a nationally representative sample of the mothers from 22 maternity hospitals between 2009 and 2011, in a broader research aimed at comparing immigrants with Portuguese mothers including monitoring of pregnancy. 499 immigrant mothers were selected, 33.1% between the ages of 26 and 30 and 28.2% between 31 and 35. Thirty-one point one percent of the women are single, 35.4% have between 10 and 12 years of schooling and 20.4% between 7 and 9 years, 10.7% are illegal and 47.2% have been in Portugal for less than a year. At a communication level 6.6% of immigrant mothers needed an interpreter to have medical consultations.

Results: The reasons presented for immigrating to Portugal were: fifty-one point eight percent of immigrant mothers came due to lack of money in their country of origin; 59% came to be close to a family member; 53.3% came because they did not have a job in their country of origin; 51.1% because they received positive references of Portugal; and 3.1% for emotional reasons. More than a third of the immigrant women mention that they send money regularly to their country of origin.

Conclusion: The reasons why the majority of immigrant mothers left their country of origin were primarily economic in nature.

Keywords: Reasons for immigrating, Immigration, Mother