In 2020, US birth rate fell to lowest point since 1970s

Birth rate in the United States fell 4% in 2020 to about 3.6 million babies, its sixth consecutive annual decline and the lowest since 1979, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics.

The rate dropped for mothers of every major race and ethnicity, and in nearly every age group, falling to the lowest point since federal health officials started tracking it more than a century ago.

The CDC did not attribute the overall decline to the pandemic, but experts have predicted that pandemic-led reasons including anxiety will hit the country’s birth rate.

In general, U.S. fertility rates have continued to fall over the years as many younger women postponed motherhood and had smaller families.

Birth rates for women in their late 30s and in their 40s have been inching up. But not last year.

“The fact that you saw declines in births even for older moms is quite striking,” said Brady Hamilton, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the lead author of the new report.

The CDC report is based on a review of more than 99% of birth certificates issued last year. The findings echo a recent Associated Press analysis of 2020 data from 25 states showing that births had fallen during the coronavirus outbreak.

But many of the 2020 pregnancies began well before the U.S. epidemic. CDC researchers are working on a follow-up report to better parse out how the decline unfolded, Hamilton said.

Older data from Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a nonprofit statistics collector, showed that the U.S. birth rate reached an all-time low in 1936 following the 1929 stock market crash.

Later, through the 1970s, birth rates took a hit again in the wake of big social changes including the landmark Roe v. Wade legal case on abortion.

In December 2020, Brookings Institute said in a report that it anticipates around 300,000 fewer births in the United States in 2021.

Many European countries have also seen a decline in births, and demographics experts have forecast a baby bust across the continent this year.

For instance, births in Italy in December - nine months after the country went into Europe’s first lockdown - plunged 22%, data showed.

Big corporations such as Reckitt, Nestle and Danone have posted a drop in sales of baby formula, partly blaming declining birth rates as well.

CDC said United States’ general fertility rate, which measures the number of births per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44 declined by 4%.

This provisional data is based on 99.87% of all birth records registered and processed last year by the National Center for Health Statistics as of February 11, 2021, according to CDC.