More than 3.8 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2017. And while that seems like a whole lot, it’s actually the lowest rate of births in 30 years.
Fertility rates have also hit an all-time low.
A new report from the Centers for Disease Controls’s National Center for Health Statistics found that birth rates dropped for women in most age groups. The number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 was 60.2 percent, down 3 percent from the prior year.
“This is a pretty big decline since the recession [from 2007–09], when the number was closer to 69 or 70 births,” Senior Researcher at the Pew Research Center Gretchen Livingston told BuzzFeed News.
Janet Adamy, a demographics reporter for the Wall Street Journal, told WBUR that research shows that people put off having children when the economy is bad.
“This imbalance creates a lot of pressure on social security, and Medicare. You don’t have the young workers paying into that program. Those programs face a lot of pressure,” Adamy said.
Adamy says it’s millennials who have put off having children since they are paying off student loan debt and have a harder time buying a house.
The birth rate has actually been declining for decades among women in their teens and twenties.
So this is a continuation of long-term trends. Groups with the deepest declines are teens age 15 to 17 and teens aged 18 to 10, by 11 and 6 percent respectively. This can be attributed to programs aimed at reducing teen pregnancy. The birth rate for women in their twenties has also declined by 4 to 5 percent.
Women in their thirties, who have the highest birth rates, had small declines. The rate of births for women 44 to 49 has actually resident by 2 percent.
So, older women are having more children than before.
Experts say these trends can be attributed to the fact that more women are delaying having children in order to pursue an education to advance their careers and also just because they want to wait.
“People are trying to get their career set up first before having children or completing their family,” Livingston said.
The fact that there are more long-term contraceptive options can also play a role in the postponement.
“Recently, more women have been delaying birth and that can lead to an overstatement at how large the decline in birth rate is in any one year,” Livingston said.
So, it’s not that fewer women are having children it’s just that millennials are holding off on having babies and may or may not have them later on.
So it doesn’t quite suggest a decline in population as of yet. Immigration is also a factor.
“Immigrants make up about 13% of the US population but the share of births to foreign-born mothers is 23%,” Livingston said.
“Immigrants are no longer coming from primarily Latin America, they’re coming from Europe, Canada, Africa and Asia… There’s a connection between immigration and fertility. When people move to the U.S., there’s a tendency to have a child,” Emilio Parrado, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, said.
“The [current] political context, the lack of easy access to health care, uncertainties of job stability that compromises family life… All of those political and social changes are contributing to low fertility. The most striking feature is that the fertility rate is really declining among immigrants. Among native-born populations, the number of births has declined around 8%, which is what you’d expect due to the recession. But for immigrants, it has actually declined twice as much (number of births between 2007-2015).”
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