Overall U.S. Birth Rate Drops as Teenage Births Hit Record Low

Teenage births rose briefly in 2006 and 2007, but hit a new low in 2022, following a multi-decade trend that began in 1991. The fertility rate among young women aged 20 to 24 also hit a record low.

But not all fertility declines are hailed as good news. Demographers say the fertility report is more than just an interesting number. Fertility is a roadmap to future aspects that most people may not be aware of, but which in some way will greatly impact most people’s lives.

Demographic changes will affect schools, economies and social programs, they say. It can affect whether or not you can cash out your home assets, or how many holes your social safety net will have as you age.

A just-released report by the Center’s National Center for Health Statistics found that while overall births are indeed down, the decline is less than 1%, but nearly all of the birth certificates filed that year are down. For disease control and prevention, according to provisional data for 2022, including all.

“Birth rates have basically declined since the Great Recession,” Emily Harris, senior demographer at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Institute for Policy Studies, told Deseret News. She said it was “normal” for both births and immigration to drop during tough economic times. “When times are uncertain, people tend to stop doing what they are doing. It means that there is

“A baby born today is the future schoolchild, the future adult, the future senior citizen. said Beth Jaros, Director of Kids Data at .

When asked why the birth rate is declining, experts say there is theory but no evidence. But there are compelling ideas as to why people delay or never give birth.

“There’s a ton of problems going on,” Harris said. “People are talking about the social and institutional issues and problems of finding housing, not finding affordable housing, the skyrocketing cost of day care, and even finding day care. There are even things that are going to happen.There are inflation concerns.Things are getting more expensive.”

When we think about infertility, we have to think about the social context of what is happening. “People are going to make very real decisions about it every day, every year,” she added.

Experts say it’s clear that one of the reasons for the declining fertility rate that’s happening in most parts of the world. Many are waiting longer to have their first child, limiting the number of children they can have.

Over 3.6 million new Americans

There will be 3,661,220 U.S. births in 2022, according to preliminary data, which is unlikely to change significantly even if confirmed in the months ahead. The center said the report included 99.91% of 2022 births registered by February 14, 2023. Data are not yet available for American Samoa, Guam and the US Virgin Islands.

The general fertility rate was 56.1 live births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, considered of reproductive age. The rate fell by about 2% each year from 2014 to 2020, rose by 1% in 2021, and declined slightly in 2022.

However, according to demographers, the US population has been declining over time, with a total birth replacement rate of 2.1 births per 1,000 women. The fertility rate in 2022 will be 1.665 per 1,000 women, well below the population replacement rate. According to the report, “The total fertility rate is an estimate of the number of births that a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would give birth to over their lifetime, based on age-specific fertility rates in a given year.”

Since the pandemic, demographers have noticed some modest fertility declines and even slight increases in some states, Harris said.

“If you look at the general trend, it seems like we’ve reached that trough at the moment and now it’s gradual and plateauing. We’ll probably see an increase. We don’t know that yet,” she said.

Why Declining Birth Rates Are Bad News

If you want to stabilize the size of your population — and experts say a lack of population portends economic and other difficulties — you’ll have to have children or rely on immigrants to increase your population.

Total fertility in the United States “has been generally below replacement since 1971 and has been consistently below replacement since 2007,” the report says.

Change is happening, though not immediately, experts told Deseret News.

“You don’t feel the impact immediately,” says Harris. “But after 30 or 40 years, you start to feel the age structure changing, and that affects society and the systems and programs that are built on the premise of the same age structure. A lot of national policies are built on the premise that there will be more young people, fewer old people, and more labor force to support them.”

Instead, the US workforce is shrinking and the number of workers above retirement age is beginning to rise.

“Fifty years from now, what will that mean for employment and the way work is done in our economy? Over the last 50 years, we have always been in a phase of growing, growing, growing. No, but it’s not growing up that fast, and part of that is because we don’t have kids and we’re not growing on the inside,” Harris said.

“The first impact[of declining fertility]will be the changing demand for schools,” Yarosh said. “We may have to make tough decisions about whether we need to close schools, or if we need to open schools if births increase. So what do we do with those resources? “

She has an eye for an interesting model that combines a school and a nursing home. “One of her ways of meeting the challenges of demographic change is dual use in the field,” she said.

In the long term, there will be workforce issues, from securing enough workers to fill jobs to increasing entrepreneurship with a strong young workforce. And it’s usually through younger workers that funding is provided so that older people can get government assistance.

Mr Harris said many of the policies and structures currently in place were “not modernized to the status quo”.

According to Jarosz, traffic patterns and transport patterns also change depending on the population. “Everyone thinks that commuting is the main reason people drive, take buses and trains,” she says. “But think about school trips and after-school activities. The timing of travel patterns and the type of transportation required will change with the population,” she said.

mother’s age and race

The decline in teen births for 15-19 year olds hit a record low. And it’s worth noting that the rate has fallen by 78% since 1991, when the teenage birth rate was at its most recent peak. In 2022, her 143,442 babies were born to women in that age group.

“For more than a decade, I’ve been saying that teenage births are at an all-time low,” Yarosh said. “I think that’s a good thing. We know that the younger you give birth, the higher your risk of complications and the more likely you are to fall into poverty.”

Many factors, including access to contraceptives, are probably responsible for the decline in teenage births, Yarosh said. Some reports have suggested that teens are less sexually active, but that is somewhat unlikely due to the rise in STDs among teens, she noted. .

The number of female births in most age categories declined slightly from 2021 to 2022, but not all, but the changes were generally very small. The provisional fertility rate for women aged 35-39 rose by 2% to 54.9 live births per 1,000 women. The proportion of women aged 40 to 44 also increased by 4% to 12.5 per 1,000.

“The fertility rate for this age group has increased almost continuously from 1985 to 2021, and the number of women born in that age group increased by 6% from 2021 to 2022,” the report said.

Birth is a big event on a ground, national and global scale, Harris said, but older people and teenage pregnancies are relatively rare compared to them, so there is no big difference in overall fertility rates. points out. during the peak period of childbirth.

The increase in fertility among older women does not surprise Yarosh, and it is not all that new, she added. “One thing to keep in mind is that it’s historically not surprising that women give birth in their early, mid, or even late 40s.” When baby boomers were born during the 1990s, many of their mothers were in their 40s, and the numbers were “at least comparable, if not higher, than what we see today,” he said. rice field.

Although the provisional fertility rate for women over the age of 45 is low at 1.1 per 1,000 women, the number of births for women in this age category increased by 12 percent, according to the report.

Yarosh said the slight decline in births among 30- to 34-year-olds was partly due to some optimism that people might just be delaying births in 2021. It was unexpected,” he said.

This may reflect structural problems in the country and a lack of adequate supportive policies for people to confidently choose to have children, she noted. . Her list of challenges, she said, included lack of paid time off, difficulty paying for quality childcare, and “extremely high” housing costs. “The fact that fertility in that age group is declining suggests such forces are at work.”

According to the report, the numbers are down 3% for American Indians, Alaska Natives and white women, and 1% for black women. Births to Asian women increased by 2%, while those to Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islander women and Hispanic women increased by 6%.

The report also found that the cesarean delivery rate rose slightly again in the third year to 32.2% in 2022, while the cesarean delivery rate for women with low-risk pregnancies remained unchanged at 26.3%. pointed out that it was not. A low-risk pregnancy is a Singelton baby considered to be full-term (at least 37 weeks’ gestation) and in an appropriate head-to-head position.

The preterm birth rate decreased by 1% to 10.38%.