Births plunge to record lows in United States
tampa — Births in the United States have plunged to record lows not seen in decades, marking a profound cultural shift that could have ramifications for the future economy, experts said on Thursday.
The overall fertility rate, which essentially shows how many babies women are having in their childbearing years, and indicates whether the population is replenishing itself, fell to 1.76 births per woman last year, down three per cent from the rate of 1.82 in 2016. That marks “the lowest total fertility rate since 1978,” said the report by the National Centre for Health Statistics, part of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meanwhile, the US birth rate plunged to a 30-year low. The 3.85 million US births in 2017 were the fewest since 1987, as American women under 40 continued to delay childbearing.
About 77,000 fewer babies were born last year than in 2016 — about a two per cent drop year-on-year.
The latest downward trend began around the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, but has not abated even as US jobs rebounded and the economy has improved. “To me the biggest surprise is the continuing decline of fertility rates among young women,” said William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow of the Metropolitan Policy Program at The Brookings Institution.
“About 10 years since the Great Recession we still see this declining fertility among women in their 20s and that could be problematic if it continues for another three or four years.” Fewer babies means fewer young workers in the coming years, cutting away at the size of the workforce, and possibly slashing productivity and tax revenue.
Combine that with increasing numbers of elderly people entering retirement, and dollars for vital services can get very tight. “You’ve got both declining birth rates and an aging population and that is why demographers are concerned,” said Donna Strobino, vice chair of education population, family and reproductive health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. —