It May Not Be a Bad Thing Fewer U.S. Babies Were Born in 2018 Than in Any Year Since 1986

With American women increasingly delaying having children, fewer U.S. babies were born in 2018 than in any year since 1986, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). About 3.7 million babies were born in the U.S. last year, 2% fewer than in 2017, according to the NCHS. Birth numbers fell across racial groups, with declines charted among white, black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian women. In 2018, the U.S. saw not only a 32-year low in total births, but also a record-setting dip in national fertility rates. Based on 2018 data, a group of 1,000 women would be expected to have 1,728 babies in their collective lifetimes, the data say—well below the 2,100 required to replace aging generations without accounting for immigration and emigration, according to the NCHS. The report, however, deals only with a snapshot in time and may not represent “births foregone. It’s simply births that have been postponed,” says Brady Hamilton, a statistician demographer at the NCHS and lead author of the new report. “Women generally do have, in the end, two children”—they may just have them later in life than did women of previous generations. In other words, the data don’t suggest that Americans are actually getting less fertile, biologically, says Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University at Pennsylvania who specializes in fertility an...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized CDC data Demography fertility Pregnancy public health Source Type: news