Demographic Contributions to Recent U.S. Fertility Decline

Vanessa Brown CalderU.S. fertility has been declining for the 15  years since the Great Recession and it is nowbelow replacement rate. While many are aware of this fact, fewer are aware of the demographic factors driving the topline numbers.A variety of demographic groups are responsible for the post ‐​2007 decline in U.S. fertility, and understanding which demographic groups are major contributors may provide hints about the underlying causes.First, fertility has declined across younger demographic groups. This is partly due to a  significant decline in births for teenagers (Figure 1), which peaked in the 1990s and fell75 percent from 1991 until 2020. Teen fertility declineaccelerated since 2007, just as U.S. fertility began its most recent drop.The decline is also due to a  decline in births for women in their twenties,particularly women in their early twenties, for which births have declined by nearly fifty percent since the early 1990s. Similar to teens, births declined more steeply for women in their twenties beginning during the Great Recession. As fertility for U.S. teenagers and twenty ‐​somethings has declined, fertility for women in their thirties and forties increased, but not enough to offset the decline for younger women.Fertility also declined across racial and ethnic groups: Hispanic, Black, and White women ’s fertility fell, but Hispanic women’s fertility declined most dramatically, by over one‐​third since 2007 (Figure 2). In other research...

Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 1, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Vanessa Brown Calder Source Type: blogs