CDC: U.S. birth rate drops for 6th straight year
The birth rate declined for the sixth straight year in 2020, the federal government reported Wednesday, early evidence that the pandemic accelerated a trend among American women of delaying pregnancy.
Early in the pandemic, there was speculation that the major changes in the life of American families could lead to a recovery in the birth rate, as couples hunkered down together. In fact, they appeared to have had the opposite effect: Births were down most sharply at the end of the year, when babies conceived at the start of the pandemic would have been born.
Births declined by about 8% in December, compared with the same month the year before, a monthly breakdown of government data showed. December had the single largest decline of any month.
Overall for the year, births declined by 4%, the data showed. There were 3,605,201 births in the United States last year, the lowest number since 1979. The birth rate — measured as the number of babies per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 — has fallen by about 19% since a peak in 2007.
The declining birth rate is just one piece of America’s shifting demographic picture. Combined with rising deaths and a substantial leveling-off of immigration, the country’s population over the past decade expanded at the second-slowest rate since the government started counting in the 18th century. The pandemic, which pushed the death rate higher and the birth rate even lower, appears to have deepened that trend.
Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire, has calculated that together with the rise in deaths — up by about 18% from 2019 — the drop in births is contributing to the aging of the American population: A total of 25 states had more deaths than births last year, Mr. Johnson said, up from five at the end of 2019.
“The birth rate is the lowest it’s ever been,” he said. “At some point, the question is going to be: The women who delayed having babies, are they ever going to have them? If they don’t, that’s a permanent notch in the American births structure.”
Births tend to dip after economic crises, as women put off having babies because of uncertainty with jobs and income. The birth rate dropped sharply in the early 1930s, after a stock market crash precipitated the Great Depression. But it picked up a few years later, once the economy started to bounce back. But the recent decline, which began after the Great Recession in 2008, has continued despite improvements in the economy. This unusual pattern has led demographers to wonder whether something else is going on.
“It’s a big social change in the U.S.,” said Alison Gemmill, a demographer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies fertility. “A gradual shift of family formation to later ages.”
Births declined across all age groups in 2020, except among women in their late 40s and girls in their early teens, both of which made up minuscule fractions of total births. The birth rate was down by 8% among teenagers, compared with 2019, and down by 6% among women ages 20 to 24. The rate among women in their early 20s is down by 40% since 2007, the government said. Teenagers have had the sharpest decline, down by 63% since 2007, the data showed.
That is a dramatic change from several decades ago, when rates of unintended pregnancy were high, particularly among teenagers, and American women tended to have babies earlier and more frequently than women in much of Europe. Today, the average age at first birth is 27, up substantially from 23 in 2010.
“I’m far too young to be responsible for a child,” said Molly Sharp, 25, who works for a women’s health research group at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City. “I’m still learning about myself and being an adult. There’s just no way I could take on that responsibility of having a kid right now.”
Ms. Sharp, who got engaged in December, has been with her fiancé, a medical student, for about seven years. She said she has also been deterred by the rising costs of having a child — from day care to college — and the knowledge that she and her fiancé will have a large amount of debt from his medical school to pay off. She said her ideal age to have a child would be in her early 30s — and that she cannot even imagine having a baby before 30.
“None of my close friends are having kids,” said Ms. Sharp, who was just accepted into graduate school. “We are working jobs and figuring out what we are doing but don’t have plans much past five years.”
It is only recently that parenthood has been considered by many to be a choice at all. Caroline Sten Hartnett, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina, pointed out that before the advent of birth control pills on a national scale in the late 1960s, women had much less control over their fertility. In 1950, they had, on average, three children. At today’s rates, women have around 1.6 — a level demographers call “below replacement” because it signals that today’s generation of parents may be producing a generation of children smaller than itself.